From Behind the Scenes to Under the Skin: The Social Bodily Experiences of Stressful, Gendered Work in Police Communicators
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Gender and work are complex social determinants of health. Little is known about how they intersect to shape health inequities. Differences in the acute strains and chronic stressors of particular occupations are systematically related to other socially structured categories, such as gender. Physiological representations of social structures like gender can be discerned through acute and chronic stress responses at work. The body cumulatively records the complexity of the social world, like work, translating gendered work into health inequities. Police communications (911 call-takers/dispatchers) is a gendered, high-stress occupation that requires intense emotion work and persistent social interactions. Engaging in this type of high-stakes emotionally demanding work – that I hypothesize is embodied – has the potential to shape health along gendered divisions of labour. Allostatic Load (AL) – a framework used to assess physiological dysregulation due to prolonged secretion of stress hormones – represents a construct through which the material embodiment of social life can be demonstrated. Long-term dysregulation, however, is the accumulation of repeated short-term responses that have become dysfunctional. Thus, acute physiological responses and AL, as biological registrations of social life, are used to examine how gendered work shapes health. Eighty-one communicators were individually observed as they worked. Participants wore a heart-rate-variability (HRV) monitor and received take-home questionnaires and salivary cortisol kits. Blood and physiological markers were collected for AL scores. A subset of 25 acutely stressful events also occurred, after which, saliva samples were collected for cortisol and oxytocin responses. Results indicate gender plays a role in the relationship between emotional labour and AL. Furthermore, the experience of posttraumatic stress is associated with increased AL. During acutely stressful events, changes in cortisol, oxytocin, and HRV are evident. Central to social stress responses, these physiological changes are differentially predicted by gendered workplace stressors. Findings suggest that gender structures might influence health through conformity to norms and the associated stress these relational beliefs/acts provoke. Furthermore, associations between physiological and subjective stress also point to mechanisms through which cumulative exposures to stressful events might increase the risk of stress-related disorders. Implications for future research on this biological embedding of gendered social experiences are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".