Women, Work, and Coping: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Workplace Stress

Until recently, theories and research about job stress and ways of coping have been based primarily on men's experience. Women's experience of stress and coping has remained unexplored, despite studies which show that women are confronted with more and different work-related stressors than men.

Written by feminists and other researchers from the disciplines of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and management science, the fourteen essays in this collection are about women's experience of paid work and women's ways of coping with employment stress. The opening essays highlight the tremendous social and cultural changes that have compelled women to develop new coping strategies. Several contributing authors examine specific workplace structures and describe women's experiences in different occupational contexts whether hostile or hospitable. Shifting from a structural to an individual perspective, other contributors deal with psychosocial factors, such as gender differences, that have been found to moderate stress and enhance the coping process. They analyse individual experiences with work-related stressors, focusing on the mediating effects of cognitive appraisals. The concluding chapters provide a critique of research methods commonly used to study work-related stress and coping and a review by the editors of the many factors and relationships which influence women's ways of coping with employment stress.

Women, Work, and Coping contains contributions by Nina Colwill, Bruce E. Compas, Esther R. Greenglass, Barbara Gutek, Catherine A. Heaney, Sharon E. Kahn, Ronald C. Kessler, Karen Korabik, Bonita C. Long, Judi Marshall, Diana L. Mawson, Lisa M. McDonald, Pamela G. Orosan, Hazel M. Rosin, Craig A. Smith, Anne Statham, Allison Tom, Elaine Wethington, and Lois M. Verbrugge.