most dangerous jobs

I am sure you have heard it before, especially when women talk about male privileges. "men work the most dangerous jobs! women have privileges like not doing those jobs!"

Well, lets look into it a bit closer. I found a few lists of most dangerous jobs, they were based on fatality data from the BLS. This one has the rank, deaths per year, and dollars per hour. For one thing, women do die in the industries that are claimed as being 'most dangerous' and others. The 2008 data shows 4,827 deaths for men, and 387 deaths for women (about one fourth of the deaths of women were homicides, compared with roughly 6 percent for men). Superficially, it seems like the claim of men being underprivileged in doing dangerous work seems true.

However, the BLS does not consider "housewife" a job, nor is "prostitute", so the death rates and injuries in those occupations aren't recorded in the same place.

Prostitution is by far the most dangerous job in america. I found a study about the death rate for prostitutes per 100,000. Luckily my article on the 15 most dangerous jobs included the same information about certain occupations. In the most dangerous jobs article, the death rate for men in the dangerous occupations per 100,000 ranged from 12-111.8. The rate for prostitutes was 229 per 100,000 (this ONLY counts homicide, it is 391 when all causes were counted).

I had difficulty finding comprehensive statistics about a large group of prostitutes, but I found several small studies that all mirrored each other in that prostitutes routinely experience rape, violence, and death. Most violence was from clients or pimps, part of the occupation. I managed to get data from a couple hundred prostitutes via gathering the studies. Prostitution is a job where women are routinely infected with STI's, including HIV, and have less access to healthcare than most other people. Prostitutes died in the course of multiple studies, like this one:

Four women died during the course of the study; two had AIDS, two were murdered. This mortality of 5.93 per 1000 person years was 12 times the expected rate for women of a similar age.

I had extreme difficulty finding any statistics on how many prostitutes are murdered per year to match against the statistics on BLS.gov. One part of the difficulty of tracking prostitution deaths is that their murders are not investigated as rigorously as the general population. They often get put in "missing" status permanently. Gary Ridgeway managed to kill 48 prostitutes in the us, most in 1982 and 1983, and the murders went unsolved until 2001. I counted and the death count for that serial killer in 1983 alone made the death per year rate of prostitutes higher than two occupations on the dangerous jobs list.

If anyone has any comprehensive data about the number of prostitutes killed each year, please contact me or leave a comment. I wish to know how it compares to bls statistics of men dying in dangerous professions. The number of prostitutes murdered is of so little importance that it is either extremely well hidden, or simply isn't counted at all.


When it comes to intimiate partner violence that ends in murder, the count is 1159 female for one year, and 385 male.


I am aware of the fact that more men die violently and kill each other more often (and that not all prostitutes are women). I am not making this post in order to make it seem like women die more than men, I am trying to refute the idea that women do not do dangerous work. We are in fact in a worse position- our jobs are not considered work, and the danger involved isn't inherent in the work. The majority of men dying in things like construction and logging are hurt by dangers inherent in the job. Women are killed because someone decided to kill them.


Not only that, but a lot of prestige is heaped on the dangerous jobs of men. There are shows about how macho and courageous loggers and fishermen are. Firemen and cops get memorials and praise. You will notice how men are compensated for their danger at a higher rate than normal non dangerous jobs. Women get the opposite of that, we become the objects of derision for either occupation, and don';t generally get compensated much.


Another dangerous occupation that doesn't make the list is the labor we all shipped off to other countries, or that is done by illegal immigrants as to exploit them. These are workers who can't get workers compensation or report unfair conditions, they are in the same boat as prostitutes in that respect. Hundreds of women have been killed or raped in juarez, mexico, while going to or from their factory jobs. There isn't necessarily reporting for this kind of thing. It isn't clear that undocumented workers who die on the job get counted on bls (considering that they aren't documented). When you die in that sort of job there isn't life insurance for your family. There isn't outrage or safety meetings. No one gives a damn. Workers without labor rights do dangerous factory work for below minimum wage and in conditions that they have no power to report or change. Non white people are over represented in the pool of injured men in the US, which is worth noting as well.