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Hey Everyone. In doing research for my Master's thesis in Organizational Psychology I came over this article with a piece of data which I found interesting and that I thought may be of interest for the Freedomain Radio conversation as well. No matter what comes of this I atleast want it to be out there. I apologize in advance for my English as it is not my native language. The tentative conclusion of this board post is that men are more likely to attend work while sick when they have autocratic managers, while women are not. I will provide the data for this conclusion and continue to speculate with that this may have its genesis in the upbringing of boys, which are to a greater degree than girls conditioned to follow orders and act in the interests of their superiors. Limitations to both the conclusion and the speculation will be provided before I turn the virtual microphone over to you the readers and request your feedback. I borrow support for the claim of this board post from an article published by Scandinavian Journal of Public Health in 2008 written by Nyberg, Westerlund, Hanson and Theorell with the title: Managerial leadership is associated with self-reported sickness absence and sickness presenteeism among Swedish men and women. Link: http://sjp.sagepub.com/content/36/8/803.short (My apologies, behind Paywall) The rest of this board post up until the last two paragraphs present relevant details of the study for increased legitimacy, persuasiveness and ability for others to scrutinize: Sample: 5141 Swedish employees. Design: Cross-sectional questionnaire study. Definitions and measurements as used by the authors of the article: Sickness presenteeism defined as "attending work while sick". The authors did not provide the wording of the question, but it can be deducted that it was a question which requested the frequency of the act of sickness presenteeism over the past 12 months. Autocratic leadership was not defined, but the details surrounding how it was measured I think will give a sufficient understanding: Autocratic leadership is a subscale developed in the Global Leadership and Organizational Behaviour Effectiveness Programme (GLOBE). Again, the exact wording of how it was measured was not provided, but the "Autocratic leadership" dimension contained four questions which asked whether the management style was: Autocratic (makes decisions in a dictatorial way) Bossy (tells subordinates what to do in a commanding way) Elitist (believes that a small number of people with similar backgrounds are superior and should enjoy privileges) Dictatorial (forces her/his values and opinions on others) The statistical analysis was a multiple logistic regression built in three steps (Models): The following table provide the results of the analysis. The numbers without parentheses represent the odds ratio for sickness presenteeism and were calculated as the risk of having four or more such occasions over the past year. The numbers inside the parentheses represent the Confidence Intervals. In conclusion: The data support that men are associated with a statistically significant increased likelihood (OR = 1.76) of exhibiting sickness presenteeism when their manager show autocratic leadership at an often frequency as opposed to when their manager does so seldom. Women do not show such a statistically significant behavior pattern. I speculate that this may have its genesis in the upbringing of boys, which are perhaps to a greater degree than girls conditioned to follow orders and act in the interests of their superiors. Showing up to work while sick can perhaps be interpreted as a fullfillment of obligations and/or interests of a superior. Keywords here can e.g. be: The military, the disposable male, tax cattle. I could have written much more about this, but I think this post is long enough as it is. I will now provide limitations to both the conclusion and the speculation: Limitations of the conclusion: Cross-sectional and self-report design When demands, control, social support and satisfaction with life in general is accounted for as in M2 and M3 the pattern does not show up. Gender segregation between the private and public sectors in Sweden (67 % of men worked in private sector as opposed to 34 % of the women) Different labour markets for men and women Differences in communication patterns between male- and female dominated occupations. Limitations of the speculation: My own biases My greatly limited knowledge of gender studies It can be a million other reasons I do not, however, want to sell my conclusion and speculation short as I do think there might be some truths to them. What do you think of it? Finally, I want to ask you what you think of this board post in general be it form or content. I, for one, do suspect that it is too inaccessible for laymen. Please be constructive if you choose to give feedback. Kind Regards