Occupational Stress and Fatigue at Sea: A Gender Perspective of Spanish Seafarers

Abstract

[Abstract] With less than 2% of women seafarers, it is undeniable that the maritime industry, and specifically work on board, is a sector historically dominated by men. Ships are hard workplaces where stress and fatigue are commonly present. Psychosocial risk factors related to the performance of tasks, work organization, and interpersonal relationships could trigger health problems related to stress, such as depression, anxiety, burnout and even suicide. Despite gender differences in the risk of suffering from occupational diseases and accidents in relation to work stress are widely documented internationally in several sectors, research exploring the correlation between gender and stress in the maritime field is scarce. This paper focuses on the perception of stress and fatigue of Spanish women working at sea, making a comparison with their male colleagues. For this purpose, a survey on stress and fatigue is distributed to seafarers, from which 236 valid responses are obtained, these are analyzed and cross-checked using the SPSS data analysis program. The results show that there is a clear difference between genders in the perception of stress, since 37.04% of women and 23.33% of men refer to a high level of stress in the last campaign on board. In the case of fatigue, the difference is greater, with 44% of women versus 21.05% of men reporting a high level of fatigue during the last period on board. The percentages of reported stress symptoms also show important differences: 41.92% of women very often experience “tendency to eat, drink or smoke more than usual”, compared to 22.65% of men who experience this symptom; 30.91% of women also suffer from migraines or headaches, while only 8.29% of men report experiencing them.