Is work in Europe more stressful for women?

Maria Walsh (00:00:00): Hello everyone. My name is Maria Walsh. I’m serving my second term as an EPP Group MEP here in the European Parliament, first elected in 2019 and re-elected in 2024. In Ireland, I represent the constituency of Midlands-North-West, which spans 15 counties across Ireland. Here in the European Parliament, I sit on a few different committees, one being the Agriculture and Rural Development Committee and the Women’s Rights and Gender Equality Committee as full members. And I'm also a member of the Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs and Regional Development committees. 

Maria Walsh (00:00:35): My priorities include agriculture, regional development, women’s rights and mental health. And I’m delighted to be here recording this video podcast with Eurofound for International Women’s Day 2026. And I'm joined today by Barbara Gerstenberger, head of the Working Life Unit at Eurofound. Today we’ll look at the latest data on working life here in Europe as gathered in the 2024 European Working Conditions Survey. 

Maria Walsh (00:01:03): Eurofound has been monitoring the development of job quality in Europe through its European Working Conditions Survey since 1990. The 2024 edition surveyed 36,644 workers across 35 countries, including more than 27,000 face-to-face interviews with workers across the EU. And since the 1990s, the female employment rate has surged from 55% to 70%. Of the 30 million net new jobs added to the EU labour market since 1995, two thirds have been taken up by women. 

Maria Walsh (00:02:00): However, while Europe has largely moved away from industrial-era physical diseases, these have been replaced by modern stressors such as burnout, techno-stress and musculoskeletal disorders. 40% of workers, disproportionately in female-heavy sectors like healthcare and services, still suffer from physical issues like working in very painful or tiring positions. But women are also more at risk of other issues, such as poor mental health related to exposure to stressors at work. And at the same time, women continue to do more unpaid work at home. 

Maria Walsh (00:02:22): They often opt for professions where they can reduce their paid working time in order to better manage work-life conflict, compounding the pay gap and the pension gap in Europe. So let’s look at the data presented by Barbara from the European Working Conditions Survey 2024 to really assess whether working life is more stressful and challenging for women and see where policymakers like myself here in the European Parliament need to focus and step up their attention to improve it. Hand it over to Barbara. 

Barbara Gerstenberger (00:02:54): Thank you so much Maria, for the warm welcome and thank you for having us here in this fantastic studio. So when we look at the European Working Conditions Survey, the results for 2024, the one thing that we can see is that in most dimensions of job quality, we actually see an improvement. And job quality, I think it's easy to realise, is a multidimensional concept. It’s not just one thing that makes a job a good job, but this overall improvement only holds as long as we look at averages. 

Barbara Gerstenberger (00:03:33): As soon as we look at specific groups of workers in specific sectors or occupations or age groups, we see that not everyone is benefiting from these improvements in the same way. And gender inequalities are one element of this. And I want to show you on my first slide what I’m talking about. So here you have the seven dimensions of job quality that we are distinguishing: earnings quality, prospects, working time quality, skills and discretion, work intensity, social environment and the physical environment. 

Barbara Gerstenberger (00:04:12): Now, I have marked with red dots the five dimensions where, if you look at the scores, women score lower than men, meaning they are experiencing poorer conditions for these five dimensions. And there are only two dimensions—working time quality, slightly better for women than for men, and the physical environment—where it is quite clear that on average women enjoy better outcomes. Now I want to look at three of these seven dimensions in a bit more detail. And I’m going to start with work intensity. 

Barbara Gerstenberger (00:04:48): And it’s important to look at work intensity because being exposed to high intensity at work is a stressor and leads to physical and emotional exhaustion. It is a psychosocial risk factor. I’m trying to get my next slide here on the work intensity index. So the work intensity index, as we can see here, is going down. And if the index goes down, that means conditions are worsening. In this case, it means that work intensity in 2024 was higher than it was in 2015 and in 2010. 

Barbara Gerstenberger (00:05:32): But the very interesting development here is that if you look at the lines for men and for women—blue for men, green for women—you can see that the development goes in opposite directions. Whereas there is a slight improvement for men, meaning they enjoy a slightly lower level of work intensity, the opposite is true for women. And again, it’s a concern because it is a psychosocial risk factor to be exposed to high intensity at work. 

Barbara Gerstenberger (00:06:08): So what is behind this difference in work intensity between men and women? In order to understand that, we need to look at different components of work intensity. On the one hand, we have what we call quantitative demands. So if you work at very high speed almost all the time or all of the time, if you work to tight deadlines, if you hardly ever have enough time to finish the job, those are quantitative demands. And here the differences between men and women are actually relatively small. 

Barbara Gerstenberger (00:06:43): But there is another component to work intensity, and that is something that we call or summarise under the heading of emotional demands. If you are as a worker exposed to emotionally disturbing situations frequently, if you have to frequently handle angry customers, if you hide your feelings at work, those are emotional demands that are also stressful and contribute to high work intensity. And here women are much more exposed than men. Why is that the case? 

Barbara Gerstenberger (00:07:19): Well, gender segregation in the labour market is the main explanatory factor here because it is in female-dominated sectors like healthcare and education where these emotional demands are particularly prevalent. Hence the difference in work intensity and how it is developing over time between men and women. Now these explanatory factors, labour market segregation, are also behind the differences we see in the social environment index. 

Barbara Gerstenberger (00:07:58): And here you see overall a positive development. We have a slight increase in the index between 2015 and 2024, but again it’s a different development for women and for men. Where it has improved since 2015 for the social environment for men, it has deteriorated slightly for women. And here the thing that we need to look at in order to explain this different development is adverse social behaviour. So if in your social environment at work you are exposed to verbal abuse, humiliating behaviours, threats, etc., this of course is not a good thing. 

Barbara Gerstenberger (00:08:45): Now, women are always more exposed to adverse social behaviour across the board, but there is another important factor that distinguishes whether or not a worker is likely to be exposed to these kinds of behaviour, and that is whether or not the worker works with customers or not. And on this graph you see that the green dots for workers who are regularly working with customers are always to the right of the blue dots for workers that do not work with customers. So again, working with customers is something that women are doing much more frequently than men, and hence it contributes again to higher exposure to adverse social behaviour and therefore a lower score on the social environment index. 

Barbara Gerstenberger (00:09:41): Now the last thing that I want to look at is working time quality. And you might remember that I initially said working time quality is one of the two dimensions where women actually fare slightly better than men. However, it’s not the case for all components of working time quality. When we look at control over working time, which is an important part of working time quality, look at the red parts of the bars. Those are people with low autonomy, where it is the company that determines the working time arrangements entirely, with no flexibility to change or to adapt. 

Barbara Gerstenberger (00:10:24): We’re going in the right direction. The share of workers that have no control over their working time is declining. But if you look at the right-hand side to the gender gap in autonomy in 2024, you will realise that again, it’s a higher share of women who do not have control over working time arrangements compared to men. So that begs the question: why are they overall not doing too badly for working time quality? And that is explained in this graph. And that has to do with hours worked per week. 

Barbara Gerstenberger (00:11:03): And here you see, I've put little red boxes around those parts of the bars that represent those working long hours—more than 41 hours per week. That is a higher share of men doing this compared to women. And those working lower hours, a lower number of hours—anything between 20 and 34 hours or even less than 20 hours per week—I marked this by a yellow box. That is a much higher share of women than men who do that. And we know that women are much more likely to work part-time. So that leads to a better outcome for working time quality. But of course it also leads, as many have mentioned already, to a pay gap and later on a pension gap. 

Barbara Gerstenberger (00:11:54): Does that now mean that women work less? Not really, if you also look at unpaid work. And this is my last slide to make that point. So on the one hand, there is some good news that a higher share of men in 2024 are now regularly involved in these unpaid work activities, and regularly means at least several times per month. So the share of men involved in caring for children and involved in housework is increasing. 

Barbara Gerstenberger (00:12:31): But if you look at the hours spent per week on this unpaid work, you see that on the graph, in households with two adults and children, the gap in hours spent is enormous. 22 hours per week for men for caring for children, 37 for women. And even for housework, same setup: two adults with children in a household, 8 hours per week for men who are regularly involved in this activity compared to 17 for women. So we can say that not only do women experience their workplace very differently, they are also involved to a very different degree in unpaid work at home. 

Maria Walsh (00:13:25): I have so many questions based off that. What really struck me was the adverse social behaviour. But I’m going to focus on a couple of questions for you, Barbara, based off this work. One being that initial question: is work more stressful for women and do they struggle more to balance the demands of work-life? 

Barbara Gerstenberger (00:13:50): Yeah, that’s quite interesting because if we look at how men and women reply to this question: "Is there a good fit between work and the demands of social and family life?" A higher share of women say, "Yes, good fit, works well for us." A slightly higher share of women say positive outcome compared to men. So when it comes to work-life balance, women are more positive. Now I would explain this by saying it is because women make it work. They make this balance work by very often then reducing paid work hours in order to be able to take up more of the responsibility at home. Again, it’s a good temporary solution. It’s a good solution for the moment. But in terms of pay gaps, of pension gaps, it is of course in the longer term detrimental. 

Maria Walsh (00:14:48): Which leads me to that next follow-up. Is this what workers want? Men and women alike, but particularly women. Choice is a powerful thing, and when you get little choice... is this what the survey is telling us about where workers would like to see improvements in job quality? 

Barbara Gerstenberger (00:15:08): Yeah, that’s a very interesting question. For the first time, we actually asked respondents in the survey: "What would you change? What are the areas where you would like to see improvements in working conditions?" And unsurprisingly, most point to pay and benefits as the one area that they would like improved, but number two in terms of frequency mentioned is working time arrangements. So there is obviously an interest in improving working time arrangements. 

Barbara Gerstenberger (00:15:42): And that is also confirmed by replies to the question when we ask: "Are you satisfied with the number of hours you currently work or would you like to increase or reduce?" And even though the majority of workers in Europe say they are satisfied with the hours they currently work, there are roughly one third of workers who say, "Well, if I could, if there were no financial implications, I would like to work less." And that is, interestingly enough, slightly more often the case for men who work longer hours—paid hours at least—slightly more often the case for men than for women. 

Maria Walsh (00:16:22): Fascinating. I, again, have so many more questions beyond that. No doubt people watching would also have their follow-up questions. But last, I have to ask, because the world of AI has certainly taken this mandate as well as the last mandate when we passed a number of pieces of legislation. So it would be remiss of me not to specifically ask the impact of digitalisation and the appearance of AI in our workplaces. Are they viewed or experienced differently by men and women? 

Barbara Gerstenberger (00:16:53): Well, when it comes to the use of AI, of generative AI at the workplace, that’s something that we asked about in 2024. Keep in mind, in AI terms, that’s almost ancient history; changes are very, very fast in that area. But at the time of the survey, 12% of workers in the EU said that they use generative AI in work regularly. And that is more the case for younger people. So there are differences between age groups, but there is also a gender gap across all age groups. Women are less likely to use generative AI at work than men are. 

Barbara Gerstenberger (00:17:41): Now, of course, the other area where technology has led to enormous changes is in terms of remote work and telework. And there we see an interesting development. On the one hand, we know that the opportunity to be able to work remotely improves the perception of work-life balance. Both men and women say, "We are in a better position to balance work demands and demands outside of paid work if we have the possibility to work remotely." 

Barbara Gerstenberger (00:18:12): However, when we look at what we call work-life conflict—so how work then impinges on non-working life—we see that women, especially when they are in hybrid work arrangements, so regular telework arrangements, struggle. They struggle to switch off. A much higher share of women in these kind of hybrid telework arrangements say that they find it difficult to stop thinking about work when they are at home. And also when it comes to being able to give the time they want to give to family, they struggle much more than men, especially in those hybrid work arrangements. So I think there is a pointer that shows that the blurring of boundaries between work and life is a bigger issue for those in telework arrangements, and that women have a bigger struggle there compared to men. 

Maria Walsh (00:19:19): Well, I think the main takeaway is that the stress women face isn't caused by one single factor. And Barbara highlighted that in depth. And I know we only went through a small piece of what the survey unfolded for you, and it can’t be solved by one single fix. It’s incredibly important that policymakers like ourselves and employers lean into the likes of this study and really understand and recognise the multidimensional impact of job quality today and what we’ll look forward to in the future. 

Maria Walsh (00:19:56): Barbara, you explained that a major source of modern stress stems from the essential sectors like care and services, where women are the backbone. And I also find it so fascinating, the reference to the AI-driven economy and how it’s important that we ensure that the lower usage of digital tools among women doesn't become a new gap in job quality. That’s incredibly important, particularly as a policymaker working on the Gender Equality Committee in particular. 

Maria Walsh (00:20:24): And of course, I think the most important takeaway is that above all else, the benchmark for a good job in Europe needs to shift. Success should be measured not by productivity, but by how well an organisation protects the health, wellbeing and work-life balance boundaries of its employees. I want to thank Barbara. I want to thank the entire team at Eurofound for sharing the below with me. And I’m also pretty sure that everyone listening found it very interesting. 

Maria Walsh (00:20:54): Eurofound, based in Ireland, celebrated a big birthday last year—the big 5-0. They have had and shared a wealth of experience with policymakers, and I think coming into our Presidency and beyond, they’re really steering the way in how we look at work, how we talk about work, and ultimately how we make better policy to protect workers for not just next year and not just one specific gender, but for many years to come. Thank you very much everybody. And I think from Barbara and us, Happy International Women's Day. 

Barbara Gerstenberger (00:21:22): Absolutely.