Sweden: Still Extreme Male Dominance in Workplace Fatalities

One subtle but yet excessively skewed aspect of our cultural blindness regarding gender issues is the issue of workplace fatalities, which we address in this article from statistics compiled by The Swedish Work Environment Authority. [1] Thus, we here focus on the levels and the trends for one single country, which happens to be well-known for its long-time extensively preventive effortd to decrease fatalites and casualties at work. Even so, the gender skewness still seems quite extreme. 

As presented in the graph below [2], the rate of female fatalities has been on a steadily low level throughout the entire measurement period of sixty years, oscillating between 1 and almost 20 fatalities at most, but with one exceptional exception: the M/S Estonia ship accident in the Baltic Sea in 1994, where 93 women and 50 men were killed on duty. [3, 4] In contrast, male fatalities have dropped significantly during those sixty years — from over 400 in 1955 to about 30 sixty years later. [4]

In total that results in 9,218 males and 464 females were reported killed on duty during the entire measurement period. Which means 95 percent were men and 5 percent were women, or 20+ times more men than women died in fatalities at work: on average 149 men were killed each year, while 7 women.  The lowest share of male fatalities — with exception of the fatal year of 1994 — was 83 percent in 2004; while the highest shares of 99 percent were reported in 1957, 1958, 1959, and 1964. In more recent times — during all the years of the 21th century, and despite the drastical drop in absolute figures as noted above — the average male share still reached 92 percent. [4, 5]

Fatality causes

The main causes to workplace fatalities during the recent period 2014–2016 are presented in the graph below.[6] Among these, about 44 percent are due to lost control of transportation vehicles (31 percent on road traffic + 13 percent off road), while persons falling and lost control of machine tools constitutes 12 and 10 percent respectively. Collapsing, falling or gliding items/material and staying on dangerous places are the causes in 7 percent each of the cases, while 6 percent were due to violence or threats. Other minor causes were e.g. material breakage, explosions/fire, electronical issues, or animal accidents.

Sources

1. Swedish Work Environment Council. (2017). Statistics on Workplace Fatalities (in Swedish)
2. Swedish Work Environment Council. (2017). Workplace fatalities 1955–2016 by gender (in Swedish)
3. Wikipedia about the Estonia accident (in Swedish); Wikipedia about M/S Estonia (in English).
4. Swedish Work Environment Council. (2017). Reported workplace fatalities by gender 1955–2016, employees. (In Swedish)
5. Swedish Work Environment Council. (2017). Reported workplace fatalities in Sweden by gender 1955–2016 (In Excel format).
6. Swedish Work Environment Council. (2017). Number of workplace fatalities among employees 2014–2016. Shares by caues. (In Swedish)