"It has been recognized that women and men have different occupational profiles which may, therefore, translate into different occupational disease risks. Yet, most of our current understanding of occupational diseases stems from evidence accumulated from studies conducted in men. Meanwhile, women currently represent 48% of the labour force in Québec. Women's health in the workplace continues to be an under-studied area and we are hindered particularly by the lack of understanding of how gender impacts workplace exposures. There is evidence that task assignments and working conditions may differ even when women and men have the same occupations. These different task assignments may translate into different exposures to toxic chemicals, ergonomic demands, risk of accidents, and psychosocial stressors. Whereas biological differences between women and men may be an underlying causal factor in the etiology of diseases, the consideration of gender differences in exposure assessment remains a challenge in occupational health research given the lack of existing tools that capture gender differences.
In the context of exposures occurring in the past or over a long period of time, expert assessment is superior to self-reported exposures since experts can account for the time period of exposure, local peculiarities of production processes or materials used, as well as particular tasks performed by the subject. Nevertheless, expert assessment remains costly in terms of resource time and thus, several prominent researchers have advocated for the use of job exposure matrices (JEMs). In particular, JEMs built from data derived from expert assessments have been proposed as a cost-efficient alternative to expert assessment. Such a database, known as the Canadian Job Exposure Matrix (CANJEM) was constructed by Drs. Jérôme Lavoué and Jack Siemiatycki from the exposure information obtained within four case-control studies conducted in Montréal between 1979 and 2004, that included over 12,000 subjects (over 30,000 jobs) wherein the majority of study subjects were men."

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ISBN (PDF) : 978-2-89797-285-1