An Analysis on the Main Factors of Occupational Stress among Indian Women – A Soft Computing Approach

Work and family are the two most important aspects in women’s lives. Balancing work and family roles have become a key personal and family issue for many societies. There are many facets in working mother’s lives that subject to stresses. They deal with home and family issues as well as job stress on a daily basis. Imbalance between work and family life arises due to a number of factors. Various factors appear to strengthen the brunt of pressure on women. Stress experienced by women at a workplace affects not only their professional life, but also family life and social intercourses. In the women’s opinion, an unpleasant workplace is such a workplace where the feeling of mental workload is connected with the lack of rewards (motivation), uncertainty resulting from organization of daily chores and lack of support from others. The high general level of stress was noted among the group of women working in IT sectors as well as among those who perform physical work (seamstresses). No significant dependencies were concluded between socio-demographic variables and the general level of exposure to intensified stress in the examined professional groups. The above research confirms the need for further examination of the working environment of women and its impact on health. Obviously, attempts should be made in order to improve the conditions of work for women, bearing in mind the fact that the adoption of neutral attitude towards the sexes when assessing risk and undertaking preventive activities may result in the female gender being underestimated or even disregarded. Regarding to woman’s household tasks and families responsibility, it is important to measure the level of occupational stress in working women and assess relation between occupational stress and family difficulties in order to obtain knowledge for health care providers to provide support to the working women and their families. There is a great need for research on working women, especially concerning the impact and occurrence of job stress on children mental health. Longitudinal data on young childbearing families are needed to examine the complex issues of work-family surrounding the family in today’s world. The purpose of this analysis is the evaluation of women’s exposure to stress-inducing factors at work and definition of a scale of the problem. The research was conducted on different professional groups of women. The research tool was the standardized questionnaire for Subjective Work Evaluation. The raw result was obtained on the basis of summing up all the points. The results of stress factors were quoted as mean results of raw values and were referred to results defined as high for a given factor. The results obtained were analyzed using a soft computing technique. KeywordsOccupational Stress, Stress Factors for Women, Soft Computing Technique.