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On December 19, 2024, the United States (U.S.) Bureau of Labor Statistics published their annual press release on fatal occupational injuries. The release, which amounts to a brief report, is 10 pages long.
In the first sentence of the report, the Bureau states that there were 5,283 fatal work injuries in the U.S. in 2023. The Bureau then displays the results in a bar graph, labelled “Chart 1.” Chart 1 shows the number of fatal work injuries in the U.S. each year from 2014 to 2023. From the graph, one learns that the average number of work fatalities per year since 2014 has been about 5,000.
On subsequent pages of the report, the Bureau discusses the results in various contexts. One context is “Worker Characteristics.” In this section, the Bureau informs readers of the race and age of the individuals who sustained fatal work injuries. Via two bullet points, the Bureau also discusses the sex of the fatally injured workers. In one bullet point, the Bureau states that “[w]omen accounted for 8.5 percent (447) of all fatalities, but accounted for 18.3 percent (84) of homicides in 2023.” In a second bullet point, the Bureau says that “[w]omen had the highest number of fatalities in the private health care and social assistance industry sector (63) followed by the retail trade sector (59).”
In this section of the report, the Bureau said nothing about male workers. In fact, a word search of all 10 pages of the report produces only one hit for the words “male” or “men.” The one hit occurs toward the end of the report in Table 1.
In Table 1, the Bureau presents the number of men and women who died in 2023 due to occupational injuries. The number of male fatalities is listed as 4,832. The number of female fatalities is listed as 447.
In Table 1, the Bureau also lists the number of men and women who were fatally injured at work in 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022. Each year, the number of male deaths is 10-12 times higher than the number of female deaths, with roughly 4,500 to 5,000 men dying each year from injuries sustained at work compared to approximately 440 women per year. Yet, nowhere in the text or graphs of the Bureau’s report are male deaths emphasized or reported separately.
Here, my purpose is to highlight the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ report on fatal occupational injuries as an example of gamma bias and to discuss some implications of this bias.
Gamma bias is a cognitive distortion that involves magnifying or minimizing a story or result based on the sex of the individual(s) involved in the story or result. One part of the gamma bias matrix predicts that women are more likely than men to be seen as victims, even when the surrounding circumstances of the victimization are equal between the sexes or favour greater male victimization.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ report represents gamma bias because it emphasizes the fatal occupational injuries of women, and it minimizes the substantially higher number of fatal occupational injuries of men. This biased or opaque presentation of data on fatal occupational injuries is problematic for a few reasons.
First, when these data are presented in a sex-segregated way, they instantly reveal a key difference between the lives of the average man and woman: the average man’s work is more dangerous than the average woman’s work. Understanding this reality then helps to combat misguided ideas like “male privilege,” which suggest that male loggers, male construction workers, and male taxi and truck drivers are more privileged and advantaged than female English professors.
An appreciation of the average man’s work also helps to facilitate a broader understanding of what men contribute to society. By filling most jobs that are hazardous, men inadvertently safeguard women from being exposed to the same risk of death. This is one reason why, for example, the observance of International Women’s Day but not International Men’s Day is misguided and prejudicial. Both sexes contribute to society in mutually beneficial ways.
Moreover, in his book, “Why Men Earn More,” Warren Farrell has argued that men’s more frequent employment in dangerous occupations is one reason why men earn higher salaries than women. Consequently, when the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics does not present fatal occupational injury data in a sex-segregated way, this prevents readers from being able to see occupational risk as a possible contributor to the “gender pay gap.”
Second, some workplace deaths can probably be prevented through worker education, advancements in technology, and modifications in work protocols and environments. Though focusing on the occupation is more likely to bring about positive results in reducing fatal occupational injuries than is focusing on worker sex, worker sex and occupation are not mutually exclusive in terms of common approaches to resolve health issues. For example, if the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were to call for grant applications for projects intended to extend male life expectancy, a project that focuses on worker safety in hazardous occupations, or a project that advances the use of technologies to reduce common causes of occupational death, such as self-driving vehicles to reduce work transportation deaths, would be one indirect pathway by which men’s health could be addressed.
Gamma bias impedes awareness of men’s health issues because qua cognitive bias it makes those issues harder to see. According to a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that focused exclusively on female deaths from intimate partner homicide there were 3,991 women in the U.S. who were victims of intimate partner homicide between 2018-2021. Intimate partner violence and homicide are serious issues. Consequently, they receive large sums of government funding, and they are given a great deal of attention among activists, academics, the media, and public health officials. Often, these groups frame (incorrectly) intimate partner violence as a “gendered” issue that primarily impacts women. Even if this were true, why then are fatal occupational injuries also not explicitly declared a “gendered” issue? In fact, the number of women killed by their intimate partners in the 4-year period from 2018-2021 was not even equal to the number of men who succumbed to fatal occupational injuries in 2023 or in any other year between 2019 and 2023. According to Table 1 in the Bureau’s report, a total of 23,887 men and 2,164 women died from fatal occupational injuries between 2019 and 2023.
Accidental injuries sustained at work are not the same as intentional homicides of intimate partners. Nevertheless, given the sizeable difference in numbers of deaths from these two causes, why is one framed as a “gendered” issue and promoted extensively by academics and public officials, while the other is not widely discussed as a sex-specific health issue? If the data were reversed, and women were the ones primarily dying as a result of fatal work injuries, we would almost certainly see a heightened focus on the sex of the fatalities, which would then cause activists, academics, and public health officials to call for immediate action on labour laws and occupational health and safety polices. Yet, when the dead are primarily men, no one blinks an eye, including the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In closing, fatal occupational injuries are never going to be zero unless people stop working. Men and women should continue to work and have the freedom to self-select into whatever every occupation they want, assuming someone is willing to hire them based on their knowledge and abilities. Moreover, given both the biological basis for sex differences in work preferences and skills, and the diverse risk profiles for various jobs, one should not expect the same number of occupational deaths among men and women.
Nevertheless, government agencies can do better when it comes to men’s health. Moving forward, the Bureau of Labor Statistics ought to present data on fatal occupational injuries in their news releases and reports in a sex-segregated way that makes the results obvious to readers. The number of male and female deaths ought to be stated clearly in text and then displayed separately in graphs that supplement the text. Such a practice of data presentation would be consistent with policies established by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and, ironically, its Office of Research on Women’s Health (ORWH).
To do otherwise would be to continue to cloud the realities of men’s lives and to impede the awareness of facts that could help men to live and flourish.
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