Heather Menzies addresses NUPGE Women's Committee

Award-winning author and social activist speaks about the high cost of stress to women

Ottawa (17 April 2008) - At a meeting held last week, author and social activist Heather Menzies spoke to the Advisory Committee on Women’s Issues (ACWI) for the National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE).

Menzies is an award-winning, Ottawa-based writer and scholar. She has authored several books, including No Time: Stress and the Crisis of Modern Life.

In her book, Menzies explores the stress people are seemingly constantly under to balance all the obligations in their lives. The advent of technology has increased this stress and, she argues, leads to a crisis of meaning and accountability which threatens to paralyze today’s society.

“Success, even survival, now depends on everyone from self-employed entrepreneurs to corporations and their employees being able to live ‘in a permanent state of emergency, bordering on the edge of chaos’,” she states. “We could be losing the ability to feel engaged and implicated enough in the larger whole of society to act on a shared sense of the public good.”

Sleeping with a blackberry

Menzies began her address to the committee with the image of pop singer Madonna sleeping with her blackberry under her pillow because she is a 24/7 kind of woman. She noted that women are still having trouble being agents of their own identity and their own agenda, not someone else’s agenda coming at them through a blackberry, cell phone in their purse, laptop in their briefcase or computer in the kitchen.

She stressed that the technological environment of today’s world has left people feeling fragmented and disembodied; a trend she sees happening in our social institutions. The move to computer driven reports, assessment plans, etc. removes workers from human contact with those they are caring for in our hospitals, schools and social services.

The constant distractions and pressures associated with the technological age has led to individuals feeling constantly distracted, with a loss of meaningful presence and engagement and an increasing sense of isolation. She argues this not only affects quality of work performance but also other key issues such as family life with children and caring for ageing and dying parents. In fact, children and elders may become “blackberry orphans”.

Menzies noted that in a recent study of academics, it was found, in addition to regular statistics that frame the story of work-family life imbalance and work-related stress (work week rising to 60 hours, supplementary work done at home, and time spent upgrading knowledge), women were more affected than men by increased workload, increased expectations of how much should be accomplished and faster decision-making rates.

More stress than men

The result is that women are reporting higher rates than men of all the stress indicators such as sleep loss, short-term memory loss and problems concentrating.

Menzies stated that women are paying a high price personally in not being able to stay centred within themselves and their own agenda and priorities. They are stuck in reaction mode and not able to be fully present and engaged with the people and activities which matter to them: children, friends, parents and union activities. She termed this state as “presenteeism” – a variation of absenteeism.

Menzies likened the issue of stress as a social equivalent to the issue of the climate change debate in that it was only when the cost of continuing with the status quo was shown to be more expensive than the cost of doing something that the causes of global warming and climate change finally gained official status. Stress is also a social justice issue. People have a right not to be bullied, harassed or overworked in the workplace.

In conclusion she stated that “most of what I have said so far is aimed at convincing union members this is an urgent issue affecting them in all the important parts of their lives, and treating it collectively as a social environment issue is the only appropriate response.”

The National Union ACWI is undertaking a project entitled the Quality of Women’s Lives which, while acknowledging that all working people are under stress, recognizes the greater burden is still falling on women. The project will work on identifying the issues and raise awareness of the problem affecting so many Canadian women. NUPGE