Research in Women dominated work
Men and women have different immune systems and different hormones, which can play a role in how chemicals are absorbed. Women tend to be smaller than men and have thinner skin, both of which can lower the level of toxins they can be safely exposed to. This lower tolerance threshold is compounded by women’s higher percentage of body fat, in which some chemicals can accumulate.
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The result is that levels of radiation that are safe for Reference Man turn out to be anything but for women. Ditto for a whole range of commonly used chemicals. And yet the male-default one-level-to-rule-them-all approach persists. This is made worse by the way chemicals are tested. To start with, chemicals are still usually tested in isolation, and on the basis of a single exposure. But this is not how women tend to encounter them, either at home (in cleaning products and cosmetics), or in the workplace.
The story of the American women from the roaring 1920s who were poisoned by the paint they worked with, and courageously fought for justice.
Radium Girls
by Kate Moore
Radium Girls
In nail salons, where the workforce is almost exclusively female (and often migrant), workers will be exposed on a daily basis to a huge range of chemicals that are ‘routinely found in the polishes, removers, gels, shellacs, disinfectants and adhesives that are staples of their work’. Many of these chemicals have been linked to cancer, miscarriages and lung diseases.
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After a shift of paid work many of these women will then go home and begin a second unpaid shift, where they will be exposed to different chemicals that are ubiquitous in common cleaning products. The effects of these chemicals mixing together are largely unknown.
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Most of the research on chemicals has focused on their absorption through the skin. Leaving aside the problem that absorption through thicker male skin may not be the same as for women, skin is by no means the only way women working in nail salons will be absorbing these chemicals. Many of them are extremely volatile, which means that they evaporate into the air at room temperature and can be inhaled – along with the considerable amounts of dust produced when acrylic nails are filed. The research on how this may impact on workers is virtually non-existent.
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BPA
It was in 2008 that the big bisphenol A (BPA) scare got serious. Since the 1950s, this synthetic chemical had been used in the production of clear, durable plastics, and it was to be found in millions of consumer items from
baby bottles to food cans to main water pipes.
The story of BPA is in some ways a cautionary tale about what happens when we ignore female medical health data. We have known that BPA can mimic the female hormone oestrogen since the mid-1930s. And since at least the 1970s we have known that synthetic oestrogen can be carcinogenic in women: in 1971 diethylstilbestrol (DES) – another synthetic oestrogen which had been prescribed to millions of pregnant women for thirty years – was banned following reports of rare vaginal cancers in young women
exposed to DES while in their mothers’ wombs. But BPA carried on being used in hundreds of thousands of tons of consumer plastics: by the late 1980s, production of BPA in the United States ‘soared to close to a billion pounds per year as polycarbonates found new markets in compact discs, digital versatile discs (DVDs), water and baby bottles, and laboratory and
hospital equipment’.
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But the story of BPA is not just about gender: it’s also about class. Or at least it’s about gendered class. Fearing a major consumer boycott, most baby-bottle manufacturers voluntarily removed BPA from their products, and while the official US line on BPA is that it is not toxic, the EU and Canada are on their way to banning its use altogether. But the legislation that we have exclusively concerns consumers: no regulatory standard has
ever been set for workplace exposure.5 ‘It was ironic to me,’ says occupational health researcher Jim Brophy, ‘that all this talk about the danger for pregnant women and women who had just given birth never extended to the women who were producing these bottles. Those women whose exposures far exceeded anything that you would have in the general environment. There was no talk about the pregnant worker who is on the machine that’s producing this thing.
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If women’s breast-cancer rates in the plastics industry were documented and recognised, ‘if we cared enough to look at what’s going on in the health of workers that use these substances every day’, it would have a ‘tremendous effect on these substances being allowed to enter into the mainstream commerce’. It would have a ‘tremendous effect on public health’.
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The result is that workplaces remain unsafe. Brophy tells me that the ventilation he found in most auto-plastics factories was limited to ‘fans in the ceiling. So the fumes literally pass the breathing zone and head to the roof and in the summertime when it’s really hot in there and the fumes become visible, they will open the doors.’ It’s the same story in Canadian nail salons, says Rochon Ford. ‘It’s a Wild West here. Anyone can open a nail salon. It’s only recently that you even needed a licence.’ But even this is ‘pretty lax’. There are no ventilation requirements, there are no training requirements. There is no legislation around wearing gloves and masks. And there is nobody following up on the requirements that do exist – unless someone makes a complaint.
But here we run into another difficulty: who is going to make a complaint? Certainly not the women themselves. Women working in nail salons, in auto-plastics factories, in a vast range of hazardous workplaces, are some of the most vulnerable, powerless workers you can find. They are poor, working class, often immigrants who can’t afford to put their immigration status at risk. And this makes them ripe for exploitation.
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The result is that workers know that if they demand better protections the response will be ‘Fine, you’re out of here. There’s ten women outside the door who want your job.’ We’ve heard factory workers tell us this in the exact same words,’ says Rochon Ford.
If this sounds illegal, well, it may be. Over the past hundred years or so, a framework of employee rights has been established. They vary from country to country, but they tend to include a right to paid sick and maternity leave, a right to a set number of hours, and protection from unfair and/or sudden dismissal. But these rights only apply if you are an employee. And, increasingly, many workers are not.
In many nail salons, technicians are technically independent contractors. This makes life much easier for the employers: the inherent risk of running a company based on consumer demand is passed on to workers, who have no guaranteed hours and no job security.