Many people will remember Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's response— Because it's 2015 —when he was asked about naming an equal number of women and men to his first cabinet. But across the Canadian labour force, gender parity in occupations and industries is far from a reality. The jobs and industries that were dominated by men or women in 1988 have remained just as segregated along sex and gender lines today as they were three decades ago.

That’s why work and health researchers need to apply a sex and gender lens to their work, says Dr. Peter Smith, a senior scientist at the Institute for Work & Health (IWH) and a Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) research chair in gender, work and health. The experiences of men and women are still so different, both inside and outside the labour market, says Smith. To ignore this is to miss an important part of the picture about how work and health are related.

In his work as a CIHR research chair, Smith recently co-edited a special issue of the Annals of Work Exposures and Health (AWEH), Vol. 62, No. 4, May 2018. The issue focused exclusively on sex/gender-based analyses of occupational health issues. The interest we received through the abstract submission and peer-review process exceeded our expectations, says Smith. It speaks to the increased momentum of research in this area.

But more needs to be done, he adds, particularly in developing research methods that can help us better describe how sex or gender interact with labour market and workplace exposures to produce differences in health outcomes. We can’t just assume that findings among men can be generalized to women, or vice versa, he notes. By taking a sex/gender lens to our research, we can produce findings that are relevant to all workers, not just to men or women only.

Described in this editorial package are the findings of recent studies by IWH scientists that examined sex and gender differences in work and health outcomes. Two were published in the special edition of AWEH, co-edited by Smith.