Day 1109: Survey Says: Quit Your Job

Or chill out.

Every once in a while, LiveScience publishes these part psychological, part cultural-anthropological studies that I find highly amusing and then ignore.  This one has to be shared.

LiveScience: Boss’ Gender Can Affect Workers’ Stress

Researchers at the University of Toronto used data from a 2005 national telephone survey of working adults in the United States and compared the stress levels and physical health problems of men and women working in one of three situations: for a lone male supervisor, a lone female supervisor, or for both a male and female supervisor.  The study found that:

• – Women who had only one female boss reported more psychological distress (such as trouble sleeping, difficulty focusing on work, depression and anxiety) and physical symptoms (such as headaches, stomach pain or heartburn, neck and back pain and tiredness) than women who worked for one male boss.
• – Women who reported to a mixed-gender pair of supervisors also reported more of these symptoms than their peers who worked for a single male boss.
• – Men who worked for a single supervisor, regardless of the supervisor’s gender, had similar levels of distress.
• – Men who worked for a mixed-gender pair had fewer mental and physical symptoms than those working for a lone male supervisor.

Hold on a second here. Let’s think about this using some Microsoft Excel action:

Women and men are mostly distressed with their supervisors, except that women are only somewhat distressed when they have male supervisors and men experience less anxiety, insomnia, heartburn and pains when they work with a mixed-sex pair of supervisors, but they still experience these symptoms of stress?  Puking your guts out vs. just the last meal?  The answer is easy, folks: Quit.  Change your job.  No, seriously, I’ve experienced a couple of obnoxious bosses, both male, but none that made me pop Zantac or lose sleep.  I guess I’ve never taken job/career seriously to the point of injuring myself.

Now for some psychological and cultural research I can get behind.  Burning question: How does one become a game academic and promote the scientific method with a joystick?