Work, life expectancy, gender: Vienna 1900–1950

Medical discourse in the 1920s in Germany and Austria produced a significant increase in papers and monographs dealing with the links between female health and women at work. This hype vanished in the Austrofascist and Nazi-Era, when, because of ideology, female work became a non-topic. After World War II, neither social gap nor gender gap were main topics of social medicine. During the economic crisis of the 1930s, World War II and the post-War period an equalization of living standards on a low level took place. Despite of this, a significant gender gap became a general phenomenon since the 1950s, rather ignored by the medical profession or attributed to biological factors. This paper shows how a shift to white collar jobs at the labor market and technological changes in industries could partly explain the widening gap between female and male life expectancy in the first half of the 20th century as far as Vienna is concerned. While before World War I female excess mortality at young age was quite common in some occupations like construction and the textile industry, this was not true any longer in the 1930s and 1950s. Whereas before World War I the mortality of unoccupied females in general had been lower than the mortality of employed females of this age group, in the 1950s this relation was inverted. Therefore the deteriorating influence of double burdens on respectable working class women’s health in the interwar period should be discussed. Concerning male morbidity and mortality advantages of safer working places and the rising share of white collar jobs for male employees, even well paid academics like physicians were beyond the overall average, quite likely because their jobs were better paid but more stressfull. This trend continued till the 1980s. Since then the gender gap has decreased slowly. But even today in Austria, Britain and other developed countries life expectancy of a male academic is not much above the life expectancy of a blue collar female employee.Medical discourse in the 1920s in Germany and Austria produced a significant increase in papers and monographs dealing with the links between female health and women at work. This hype vanished in the Austrofascist and Nazi-Era, when, because of ideology, female work became a non-topic. After World War II, neither social gap nor gender gap were main topics of social medicine. During the economic crisis of the 1930s, World War II and the post-War period an equalization of living standards on a low level took place. Despite of this, a significant gender gap became a general phenomenon since the 1950s, rather ignored by the medical profession or attributed to biological factors. This paper shows how a shift to white collar jobs at the labor market and technological changes in industries could partly explain the widening gap between female and male life expectancy in the first half of the 20th century as far as Vienna is concerned. While before World War I female excess mortality at young age was quite common in some occupations like construction and the textile industry, this was not true any longer in the 1930s and 1950s. Whereas before World War I the mortality of unoccupied females in general had been lower than the mortality of employed females of this age group, in the 1950s this relation was inverted. Therefore the deteriorating influence of double burdens on respectable working class women’s health in the interwar period should be discussed. Concerning male morbidity and mortality advantages of safer working places and the rising share of white collar jobs for male employees, even well paid academics like physicians were beyond the overall average, quite likely because their jobs were better paid but more stressfull. This trend continued till the 1980s. Since then the gender gap has decreased slowly. But even today in Austria, Britain and other developed countries life expectancy of a male academic is not much above the life expectancy of a blue collar female employee

Workflow interruptions and mental workload in hospital pediatricians: an observational study

Background: Pediatricians' workload is increasingly thought to affect pediatricians' quality of work life and patient safety. Workflow interruptions are a frequent stressor in clinical work, impeding clinicians' attention and contributing to clinical malpractice. We aimed to investigate prospective associations of workflow interruptions with multiple dimensions of mental workload in pediatricians during clinical day shifts. Methods: In an Academic Children's Hospital a prospective study of 28 full shift observations was conducted among pediatricians providing ward coverage. The prevalence of workflow interruptions was based on expert observation using a validated observation instrument. Concurrently, Pediatricians' workload ratings were assessed with three workload dimensions of the well-validated NASA-Task Load Index: mental demands, effort, and frustration. Results: Observed pediatricians were, on average, disrupted 4.7 times per hour. Most frequent were interruptions by colleagues (30.2%), nursing staff (29.7%), and by telephone/beeper calls (16.3%). Interruption measures were correlated with two workload outcomes of interest: frequent workflow interruptions were related to less cognitive demands, but frequent interruptions were associated with increased frustration. With regard to single sources, interruptions by colleagues showed the strongest associations to workload. Conclusions: The findings provide insights into specific pathways between different types of interruptions and pediatricians' mental workload. These findings suggest further research and yield a number of work and organization re-design suggestions for pediatric care

SOC Strategies and Organizational Citizenship Behaviors toward the Benefits of Co-workers: A Multi-Source Study

Background: Individuals' behavioral strategies like selection, optimization, and compensation (SOC) contribute to efficient use of available resources. In the work context, previous studies revealed positive associations between employees' SOC use and favorable individual outcomes, like engagement and job performance. However, the social implications of self-directed behaviors like SOC that are favorable for the employee but may imply consequences for coworkers have not been investigated yet in an interpersonal work context. Objective: This study aimed to assess associations between employees' use of SOC behaviors at work and their organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) toward the benefits of co-workers rated by their peers at work. We further sought to identify age-specific associations between SOC use and OCB. Design and Method: A cross-sectional design combining multi-source data was applied in primary school teachers (age range: 23-58 years) who frequently teach in dyads. N = 114 dyads were finally included. Teachers reported on their SOC strategies at work. Their peer colleagues evaluated teachers' OCB. Control variables were gender, workload, working hours, and perceived proximity of relationship between the dyads. Results: We observed a positive effect of loss-based selection behaviors on peer-rated OCB. Moreover, there was a significant two-way interaction effect between the use of compensation strategies and age on OCB, such that there was a positive association for older employees and a negative association for younger employees. There were no significant main and age-related interaction effects of elective selection, optimization, and of overall SOC strategies on OCB. Conclusion: Our study suggests that high use of loss-based selection and high use of compensation strategies in older employees is positively related with OCB as perceived by their colleagues. However, high use of compensation strategies in younger employees is perceived negatively related with OCB. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of the age-differentiated interpersonal effects of successful aging strategies in terms of SOC in organizations

Generalized analysis of a dust collapse in effective loop quantum gravity: fate of shocks and covariance

Based on modifications inspired from loop quantum gravity (LQG), spherically symmetric models have recently been explored to understand the resolution of classical singularities and the fate of the spacetime beyond. While such phenomenological studies have provided useful insights, questions remain on whether such models exhibit some of the desired properties such as consistent LTB conditions, covariance and compatibility with the improved dynamics of loop quantum cosmology in the cosmological and LTB sectors. We provide a systematic procedure to construct effective spherically symmetric models encoding LQG modifications as a $1+1$ field theory models encoding these properties following the analysis in our companion paper. As concrete examples of our generalized strategy we obtain and compare with different phenomenological models which have been investigated recently and demonstrate resolution of singularity by quantum geometry effects via a bounce. These include models with areal gauge fixing, a polymerized vacuum solution, polymerized junction conditions and an Oppenheimer-Snyder dust collapse model. An important insight from our approach is that the dynamical equations care about the $\det(e)$ part rather than the square root of the determinant of the spatial metric. As a result, shock solutions which have been argued to exist in some models are found to be absent even if one considers coordinate transformations.Comment: 25 pages,1 figur

Dipole-dipole correlations and the Debye process in the dielectric response of non-associating glass forming liquids

The non-exponential shape of the $\alpha$-process observed in supercooled liquids is considered as one of the hallmarks of glassy dynamics and has thus been under study for decades, but is still poorly understood. For a polar van der Waals liquid, we show here - in line with a recent theory - that dipole-dipole correlations give rise to an additional process in the dielectric spectrum slightly slower than the $\alpha$-relaxation, which renders the resulting combined peak narrower than observed by other experimental techniques. This is reminiscent of the Debye process found in monohydroxy alcohols. The additional peak can be suppressed by weakening the dipole-dipole interaction via dilution with a nonpolar solvent

Hospital doctors' workflow interruptions and activities: an observation study

BACKGROUND Interruptions of hospital doctors' workflow are a frequent stressor, eventually jeopardising quality of clinical performance. To enhance the safety of hospital doctors' work, it is necessary to analyse frequency and circumstances of workflow interruptions. AIM To quantify workflow interruptions among hospital doctors, identify frequent sources and relate sources to doctors' concurrent activities. METHODS Within a typical hospital, 32 participant observations of doctors' full work shifts were carried out. Time-motion information was collected on types of workflow interruption and doctors' activities and analysed with logit-linear analyses. RESULTS The frequency of workflow interruptions was high, especially on the intensive care unit and emergency ward. Telephones and bleepers were the most frequently recorded type of work interruption. The combined analysis of doctors' activities and concurrent workflow interruptions revealed that the likelihood of the occurrence of certain types of interruption depended on the tasks being carried out by the doctor. CONCLUSION The present method may be useful for quantifying and distinguishing sources of hospital doctors' workflow interruptions and useful in raising awareness of organisational circumstances