Medicine and the sexual division of labour: An analysis of the scientific discourse on the role of the "human factor" in improving performance at work (Spain 1920-1950)

Abstract

During the first third of the twentieth century, and especially after the 1920s, a discourse on occupational hygiene and safety began to develop in Spain. This discourse, without rejecting the value of the work carried out in the factory environment, particularly stressed the need to take into account what was called the «human factor». Promoted mainly by the budding occupational doctors and psychologists, this discourse became part of both the lines of biological thinking of constitutional pathology as well as the economic ideas of the so-called OCT, and it expounded the need to take the somatic and psychic characteristics of people into account in order to carry out a «rational» distribution of the same in the workplace. The article aims to highlight the way in which this discourse contained elements that would help to attribute specific roles within the workplace based on the biological and psychological characteristics of men and women, so facilitating the legitimisation of a sexual distribution of work which helped to reinforce the social organisation of gender at that time.