WEDNESDAY, Aug. 29, 2001 (HealthDayNews) -- The key to a longer life may be the one that opens the executive suite.
Men and women both live much longer if they're in a high-level job, one that earns them $75,000 to $100,000, says a new study. In fact, 15 years of data on nearly 19,000 people showed that men in that category had half the risk of dying as men in the general population. Interestingly though, high-powered women in the study had only 38 percent of the risk of dying as other women.
Why didn't high-level jobs seem to protect the women as much as the men when the study subjects were all matched for age, pay scale and supervisory role? Smoking's to blame, say the researchers.
"Men benefit more than women from high-level employment, most likely because the rate of cancer among men drops," says Kevin Kip, assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh and one of the authors of the study. "Our speculation is that women in these upper echelons are smoking, maybe because of the stress level of the job."
In a recent report in the American Journal of Epidemiology, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and the National Center for Health Statistics found that men in upper-level jobs in the federal government, such as managers, doctors and engineers, ran a 40 percent higher risk of dying during the 15 years of the study than women. That's a much better percentage than men in general, who are 70 percent more likely to die between ages 30 and 69 than women.
In the overall population, women outlive men by about six years, thanks largely to estrogen's ability to protect against heart disease.
The researchers looked at the number of deaths among 18,908 civil service employees -- those ranked at the General Schedule level of 14 and above -- between 1979 and 1993 and compared those deaths with the overall U.S. mortality rate.
Kip says the findings didn't surprise him.
"We call it the 'healthy worker effect. You have to be in fairly reasonable health to work, so employed people are likely to live longer than the general population, which includes people too sick to work. People in virtually any occupation will do better than the general public," Kip says.
The researchers found 10 female federal employee deaths for every 14 male high-ranking federal employee deaths, better than the ratio of 17 male deaths to 10 female deaths in the general public.
While the rate of heart disease was about equal between men and women, women in the study were far more likely to die from cancer, especially lung cancer and pulmonary diseases like emphysema, than the men.
"The women in these jobs weren't getting stressed out and dying from heart disease," Kip says. "But cancer is a different story."
Women's risk of lung cancer increases with age. One previous study of 1,000 men and women at New York Presbyterian Hospital in New York City found that women smokers at age 60 have more than twice the risk of lung cancer than male smokers the same age. Doctors aren't sure why women's risk is higher. Other studies have found that while smokers are typically scarce in prominent jobs, the female executives who do smoke light up more frequently than their male counterparts.
What To Do:
Psychologist Royda Crose, author of the book Why Women Live Longer than Men, says women who climb the corporate ladder adopt competitive attitudes that raise stress levels. She suggests they learn a lesson from their fellow workers in the trenches -- that relationships with friends, family and colleagues are just as important in upper management as they are for anyone else.
For tips on how to quit smoking, try the American Lung Association.
Feeling a little stressed by your job? You may find some help here. This CBS HealthWatch report tells why executives have less job stress than people lower on the company's food chain.
