How many housewives die on the job?

In an earlier post, criticizing a men’s rights column by Glenn Sacks and Diana Thompson, I quoted the column’s statement that “On average, every day 17 [U.S. workers] die – 16 of them male.” In the comments to my post, Arbitrary Aardvark wrote:

The sixteen of seventeen stat was probably calculated from Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers (pdf link). I’m pretty sure there’s some way of getting Glenn’s numbers from that data (probably by using an average of multiple years).

As for including housewives, that’s an interesting idea. However, I have no idea how you’d do that – I don’t know that anyone’s put that data together.

But let’s try bullshitting it. (And I’m quite serious about that – the statistical speculation that fills this post is total bullshit, and I’m not going to pretend that these numbers would be defensible in any serious policy discussion. This is for entertainment purposes only, folks.)

In 2000 (most recent year I found – probably the numbers have dropped a bit since then, especially for male victims), 440 men and 1247 women were murdered by spouses, ex-spouses and boyfriends or girlfriends. About 70% of women who live with their husbands have jobs aside from being housewives; put another way, 30% of wives could be described as full-time housewives. If 30% of the 1247 women murdered by intimates in 2001 were housewives, then that’s 374 housewives murdered.

According to the official statistics, in 2000 there were 5,471 male and 449 female workplace deaths. If we included 374 murdered housewives when counting workplace deaths (and ignoring the question of househusbands dying on the job each year), then there were 5,471 male and 823 female workplace deaths in 2000. That changes the stat a little, but overall it’s clear that men are still the predominate victims.

Of course, that “374” number is total nonsense – for instance, it may be that housewives are more or less likely to be murdered than other intimates, in which case the 30% number is wrong. And what about girlfriends? And what about housewives who are murdered on the job by someone other than a husband or boyfriend?

Also, I suspect that most housewives who die on the job aren’t murder victims. Murder deaths are relatively uncommon; what’s much more common is deaths due to car and truck accidents. How many housewives and stay at home mothers are killed each year in traffic accidents that occur while they’re “on the job” (driving to school or the grocery store, etc)?

I doubt the data even exists. In 2000, there were 6,495 fatal accidents a year involving female drivers (and 15,323 involving male drivers). If we assume that housewives are no more or less likely to die while driving than other women, then about 1,949 housewives died while driving a car in 2000. How many of those 1,949 were “on the job,” it’s impossible to say.

Still, what the heck. Let’s add those 1,949 women to the workplace death total (probably nearly all the driving done by housewives is related to their work, anyhow). Counting that along with our bullshit stat for housewives murdered each year, there were 5,471 male and 2,772 female workplace deaths in 2000. Male deaths still predominate, but the difference is less extreme.

However, I suspect that housewives are actually less likely to die while driving than most women. Why? Because the typical housewife is probably between the ages of 25 and 49, which are the least likely ages for a driver to get into a car crash (drivers below 20 and above 75 years old are the most likely to be in an accident). Plus, housewives are especially likely to be driving with children in the car, and my anecdotal observation is that parents with children in the car are especially cautious drivers.

But then again, even if we could count the number of full-time housewives who die in auto accidents on the job, that wouldn’t tell us everything. How many housewives die in household accidents, for instance? I don’t even know where to look.

What about parents who aren’t stay-at-homers but who nonetheless die while doing some home or child related work, or while driving to or from housework-or-child-related chores? If we’re including housewives when counting on-the-job deaths, shouldn’t we also count those who die in the course of their part-time job as a housewife (or househusband?)

Plus, what about the husbands and fathers who die each year trying to clean the gutters or driving Junior to school? (Men do less of the housework-related driving, but then again men are on average much worse drivers than women, so maybe they get into more housework-related car accidents despite driving less.)

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Anyhow, it may make sense to consider “paid job deaths” and “housewife deaths” separately. The solution to paid job deaths is better funding of OSHA, going after unsafe employers, and above all unionizing. None of these solutions really apply to housewives and SAHPs (stay-at-home parents), and that’s a good reason not to conflate the two problems. Perhaps workers and housewives should be counted separately, in this instance.

What’s disturbing to me, is that housewives aren’t being counted at all. How many housewives, househusbands and SAHPs die accidentally each year should be something that someone keeps track of – but as far as I can tell, no one does..