Occupational Stress of Women in the Service Sector:An Empirical Study

This paper is a study to find specific causes, symptoms of stress and depression of women in some selected categories of services having different demographic profiles and job conditions. 230 women in six service sectors are chosen from Kolkata for the study through structured questionnaire in a stratified sampling method. The selected sectors are Health care, Financial services, Transport, IT/BPO, Education and Communication. Stress related variables are clubbed under two heads. The first three sets of variables deal with some specific causes of stress. The second group of the variables deals with the occurrence of symptoms of stress on women at three levels i.e. psychological, physical and behavioural. Different statistical tools examine the dependency and association of the variables with relation to general profiles and job conditions of the respondents. Correlation analyses of the variables and sectoral comparisons are also established through this exploratory research.