The Sickness Absence Paradox by Unn Therese Omdal

The sick leave paradox

Why do women have such high rates of sick leave – and what can we do about it?
The Norwegian Women's Sanitary Association has been an important driving force for women's health for more than a hundred years and for highlighting health challenges that have long received too little attention. Women's health is also an important part of the backdrop for Unn Therese Omdal's book The Sickness Absence Paradox.

Why do women have significantly higher rates of sick leave than men? And what happens if we stop looking for the explanation only in the individual woman, and instead look at the connection between women's health, work life and women's lives?
In the lecture The Sickness Absence Paradox, Unn Therese draws on research, social analysis, and the stories of women she has interviewed about health, work, sick leave, and the encounter with the systems around them.

She shows, among other things, how biological differences and women's health, the organization of working life, caregiving responsibilities and the stresses of different life phases interact. At the same time, she challenges some of our ideas about sick leave: Perhaps the solution is not primarily about the individual becoming better at "pulling themselves together", but about how we create a working life that takes greater account of the people who will actually be in it?
The lecture is also about what we can do, as a society, in our workplaces and in our encounters with each other, to create a more health-promoting and sustainable working life.

About the speaker

Unn Therese Omdal is a political scientist, author and lecturer from Egersund. She has a background in politics and work inclusion and has worked on issues related to working life, health and society for many years. She is the author of The Sickness Absence Paradox and Diagnosis: Good Girl, and currently works as a job consultant in addition to her writing and lecturing activities.