2020 is a year many will be happy to see the back of. It has been a stressful time for sure with periods of lockdown creating major challenges for our day to day work and family lives. But have the stresses and strains associated with lockdown affected the mental health of the UK population as…
Tag: Understanding Society
Working and caring: the mental health toll of combining paid work and childcare during lockdown
Baowen Xue and Anne McMunn from the ESRC International Centre for Lifecourse Studies at University College London discuss new research showing that women spent considerably more time than men undertaking housework and childcare during lockdown and the knock on for working parents’ mental health, particularly that of lone mothers. They explain how the analysis adds…
Is temporary employment bad for your health?
How is the health of those in insecure jobs affected by their working lives? Rachel Sumner and colleagues* have discovered some types of work may be just as strongly linked with poor health as unemployment is. It’s long been acknowledged that there’s a link between unemployment and poor health. A recent Government Green Paper put…
Domestic work – why do women still do the lion’s share?
A recent international report suggests men need to increase their time spent doing unpaid care work by a minimum of 50 minutes per day in order to do 50 per cent of the work. The report calls for bold measures to help all men do their fair share of this work by 2030 and thus promote…
Is working flexibly good for your health?
Flexible working is considered good practice – and in England, most workers have the right to apply to work flexibly after they’ve been in their job six months. But what do we know about the benefits? A new study by Tarani Chandola and colleagues used biological measures to look at differences in stress markers among…
Anti-social working hours: Are they making women depressed?
The rise of globalisation and the 24/7 economy are fuelling demands for people to work long hours and weekends. But what’s the evidence about how these ways of working link with depression? Gill Weston and colleagues from the International Centre for Lifecourse Studies in Society and Health at UCL and Queen Mary University of London found such working conditions are linked to poorer mental health in women. Across the globe, the effects of overwork are becoming…
Being a carer: a sizeable problem
Millions of people combine work with caring responsibilities – looking after an older relative, a disabled child or a partner, for example. But what are the effects on the health of those who do this? Rebecca Lacey and colleagues from the ESRC International Centre for Lifecourse Studies at UCL have found that younger women and…
Unretirement: can it be a positive story for all?
“When I was sitting around at home I would just get grumpy. I’ve also lost five stone since working here. This is like a vitality camp for me.” Retired British Transport Police inspector Brendan McCambridge, 56, interviewed in The Telegraph, describes how his new role at Waitrose has improved his life. He is one of…
Out of work and overweight: Think again.
There’s a widely held preconception that people who are out of work are overweight, perpetuated by the media and, indeed, reinforced by some academic studies. But recent robust evidence throws a whole new light on things and indicates that unemployed people are in fact much more likely to be underweight, and less likely to be…
Having any job at all is better than being unemployed, right?
“Bad work just doesn’t fit in 2017!” Those are the words of Matthew Taylor, head of the Government’s recent review of modern work practices, who has called on politicians to make “all work good.” In an interview with the BBC, Mr Taylor, said that, as well as being bad for productivity and the economy, poor…