Gender, work schedules and work/family regulation.

The Gender and Work Technical Committee (TC) of the International Ergonomics Association (IEA) is responsible for this issue of the journal WORK. Since many of the authors come from the scholarly tradition of ergonomic analysis of work activity, we should explain that, in this context, the word “regulation” refers to the attempts made byworkers andworkers’ groups to manage job requirements and constraints while meeting their own needs and respecting their own limits and abilities. Therefore the issue centers on work-family balancing strategies used in the workplace. The TC, set up by IEA to provide a gender perspective in ergonomic analysis, has been particularly active in discussing themes like work schedule regulation, risk perception, work methods, and other themes at the intersection of gender and ergonomics: How can we understand the differences between men’s and women’s working conditions and their effects on health? How can we integrate gender-sensitive analysis into our intervention and research in ergonomics? How can we design working situations that take into account the biological and social differences between men and women? How to understand the various work activity and regulatory strategies of women and men in male-dominated, female-dominated and more mixed-sex workplaces? How does thinking about gender change our models and our methodologies for ergonomics research and intervention? This journal issue represents the results of some of these discussions. The following explanations may be useful for those who are not familiarwith French-languagepublications