LAUSR

There has been limited attention to gender as a wider structural influence on either working conditions or health outcomes in occupational epidemiology.1 2 From an analytic perspective, gender is often treated as an individual characteristic that may either confound or modify an exposure–outcome relationship.3 This is despite the awareness in epidemiology that expressions of gender relations, such as gendered segregation of the workforce and gender discrimination in wages, are important public health issues.4 The article by Buscariolli and colleagues5 uses a national data set to interrogate the influence of both the gendered working environment and gender on antidepressant use in Finland. As the authors point out in the rationale for the study, there has been a lack of longitudinal research on this topic. The current study is based on a 19-year follow-up of over 752 683 women and men working in human service occupations. Aside from a methodological rationale, the current study starts to fill the notable gap in occupational epidemiology regarding gender relations. …