The occupational structure of Finnish work life is gendered. The type and recurrence of strain experienced at work vary depending on the gender distribution. The graph describes the emotional strain related to social interaction in different occupational groups.
Description
Most employees encounter other people in their work. Interacting with others often involves feelings. They may vary in intensity and tone. Sometimes social interaction involves emotional strain.
The occupational structure of Finnish work life is gendered, and there are differences in emotional strain between female and male-dominated professions.
The graph depicts the share of interaction that provokes emotions of total working time (horizontal axis) and the burden caused by the emotions (vertical axis) in male and female dominated occupational groups as well as in those distributed evenly by gender.
The graph was produced as part of the Finnish Work Environment Fund’s research project Differentiating emotions: the role of an employee’s generation and gender in their emotional experiences of work life and work ability and their management (project No. 230304).
What do the indicators describe?
In 2022-2023, more than 7,000 randomly selected working people in mainland Finland answered the following questions about work, interaction and emotions:
- Often jobs involve interaction with other people (e.g. colleagues, managers, customers, school children, patients, stakeholders) that can provoke different kinds of emotions. Does your job involve this kind of emotional interaction?
- Do these feelings cause strain in your work?
The respondents were 20-67 years old and responded to the questions on a four-point scale. The graph depicts the averages of the responses by occupational group. The horizontal axis represents the averages of the responses to question 1, the vertical axis to question 2.
In the bottom left are the occupational groups in which interaction-related emotions rarely arise and in which emotional strain related to interaction is rarely experienced.
In the top right, on the other hand, are the occupational groups in which interaction-related emotions occur repeatedly and in which stress related to such emotions is experienced more frequently.
The size of the circles depicting occupational groups in the graph refers to the relative number of employees working in those occupational groups in Finland in 2023. The data in the graph is based on occupational groups with at east 15 responses to each question. In 2023, nearly 90 per cent of Finnish employees worked in the occupational groups depicted in the graph.
The occupational groups are classified in five categories according to gender:
- Strongly male-dominated occupational groups (over 90% of the group’s employees are men)
- Male-dominated occupational groups (60–90% of the group’s employees are men)
- Equally split occupational groups (share of men and women in the group’s employees are 40-60%)
- Female-dominated occupational groups (60–90% of the group’s employees are women)
- Strongly female-dominated occupational groups (more than 90% of the group’s employees are women)
Group averages have been adjusted for non-response bias using weighting factors. The data collection and other results of the survey are described in detail here: Working Finland: Working conditions, work ability and well-being at work in the Healthy Finland Survey. The data is based on the work life section of the Healthy Finland survey, which was carried out by the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health in collaboration with the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare.
Statistics and register data from Statistics Finland have been used as background information for occupational classification, gender distribution of occupations and the size of occupational groups.
