Gender and work are important social determinants of health, yet studies of health inequities related to the gendered and emotional intricacies of work are rare. Occupations high in emotional labour – a known job stressor – are associated with ill-health and typically dominated by women. Little is known about the mechanisms linking health with these emotional components of work. Using physiological and questionnaire data from Canadian police communicators, we adopt an embodied approach to understanding the relationship between gender norm conformity, emotional labour, and physiological dysregulation, or allostatic load. For high conformers, emotional labour leaves gendered traces in the flesh via increased allostatic load, suggesting that in this way, gendered structures in the workplace become embodied, influencing health through conformity to gender and emotion norms. Findings also reveal that dichotomous conceptions of gender may mask the impact of gendered structures, obscuring the consequences of gender for work-related stress.

性别和工作是健康的重要社会决定因素，但与工作的性别和情感错综复杂相关的健康不平等研究很少见。高情绪劳动的职业——一种众所周知的工作压力源——与健康状况不佳有关，通常由女性主导。关于将健康与工作中这些情感成分联系起来的机制知之甚少。使用来自加拿大警方通讯员的生理和问卷数据，我们采用具体的方法来理解性别规范一致性、情绪劳动和生理失调或平衡负荷之间的关系。对于高度顺从者来说，情绪劳动通过增加的异动负荷在肉体中留下性别痕迹，这表明通过这种方式，工作场所的性别结构变得具体化，通过遵守性别和情感规范来影响健康。研究结果还表明，对性别的二分法概念可能掩盖了性别结构的影响，掩盖了性别对工作相关压力的影响。