The Rules, the Strategies and Gender Regarding Safety

The constraints faced by women and men at work deserve to be apprehended for the development of more effective prevention solutions regarding chemical exposure and occupational cancer. So far, the constraints, as so as the resources mobilize by the people at work to preserve productive and safety activity, are not included to the design of the prevention of chemical exposures. As part of a research-intervention on occupational chemical risk prevention, we mobilized ergotoxicology. This approach, which aims to involve workers in the analysis of chemical risk work situations, from a chemical metrology integrated into the work activity, has made it possible to document essential element to build the prevention at different scale. The intervention demonstrated that the documentation of the strategies developed by workers according gender (in order to save their bodies, reduce the discomfort of the presence of chemical substances, put into words the impact of work on health or to preserve and protect others workers) could help to better prevent chemical exposures, particularly indirect chemical exposures. The results also show that the methodology for analyzing risk situations which makes it possible to build prevention at different levels (operation, company, state) deserves to be enriched in order to document the gendered strategies from which to think about the design of safety situations (at work and in its continuity).