Sex Differences in Vulnerability to Undesirable Life Events

Abstract

Past research has shown that the emotional impact of undesirable life events is significantly greater among women than men. This finding has ted to speculation that women possess a deficit in coping capacity or in access to social support that renders them pervasively disadvantaged in responding emotionally to problematic situations. We present a different argument in this paper. We hypothesize and then document that women are not pervasively more vulnerable to the effects of undesirable events. A disaggregated analysis of life-event effects shows, further, that female vulnerability is largely conftned to "network " events: life events that do not occur to the focal respondent but to someone in his or her social network who is considered important. Further results are presented to argue that this greater vulnerability is due to the greater emotional involvement of women in the lives of those around them. It is demonstrated that this emotional cost of caring is responsible for a substantial part of the overall relationship between sex and distress. It is well documented that women in Western society have significantly higher rates of psy-chological distress than men (Al-Issa, 1982). In sociology, most discussions of this fact have revolved around the idea that women " s social roles are more stress provoking and less ful-filling than those occupied by men (Gove, 1978). This social-role explanation has fostered a substantial body of research on sex dif-ferences in chronic role-related stress. This work has typically been based on indirect mea-sures of stress. Marital status, numbers and ages of children, and employment status have been used to make inferences about chronic