Inequalities in women's health in England and Wales: mortality among married women according to social circumstances, employment characteristics and life-cycle stage

Moser, K.A.; Pugh, H.S.; Goldblatt, P.O.

Genus 46(3-4): 71-84

1990


ISSN/ISBN: 0016-6987
PMID: 12343335
Document Number: 384109
Data obtained from follow-up of the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys Longitudinal Study 1971 Census sample have been used to look at women's mortality differentials at ages 15-59 in England and Wales. Earlier work (1988) grouped women according to a range of social, economic, and demographic characteristics, and found large groups with considerable differences in mortality. In particular, wide differences by social class were found among married housewives and single women. This analysis did not, however, incorporate any measure of women's life-cycle stage and its effect on their employment. In this paper we focus on married women and used age of youngest child as a measure of life-cycle stage. We relate this to whether the women was a housewife, or was in full or part-time paid employment, so as to examine how these affect differences in mortality by social class. We find that scio-economic mortality differences persist irrespective of life-cycle stage. This confirms the gradients we found in our earlier work. Housewives married to men in manual occupations experienced death rates over one and a half times as high as those married to men in non-manual occupations. For women in employment the differences by husbands' social class are of a lesser magnitude. Among the nulliparous and women with older children those in employment generally have lower mortality than housewives; this is not true for those with dependent children. Particularly low mortality is found throughout for women in part-time non-manual work. Differences in the mortality of those in full and part-time work depend on the women's own social class and are greater for non-manual than manual classes.

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