The SAGE team's research program is structured around the theme "Occupational health through a gender and sex analysis: what challenges and what interventions to promote health and equality at work?". It is divided into three areas taking into account gender and its interweaving in other social relationships (including social class and racialization). They are both complementary and intertwined.
The first research area is focussed on the role of the regulatory framework governing workplaces in the persistence of social and occupational health inequalities. The second area involves analyzing the practices, strategies, discourses and relationships among actors within workplaces and the interactions among them, as well as with elements of the workplace environment (e.g., requirements, schedules, tasks, physical and spatial environment). The third area is aimed at filling the gaps in traditional approaches to occupational health by developing research and intervention tools as well as analysis and evaluation methods that are sensitive to social and gender inequalities.
An integrated understanding of the mechanisms at work in the first two areas stimulates reflexion on the development of legislative frameworks and public policies (Area 1) as well as organizational measures in the workplace (Area 2) to counter the persistence of social and occupational health inequalities. The third area interacts with the other two in a process of ongoing exchange on the reflexive analysis of the theoretical models and methodological tools used in the projects situated in the 1st and 2nd research areas.
The complementarity of the axes and the action-oriented program targeting unions, organizations, communities and science contribute to the development of occupational health research and intervention in two ways: first by expanding knowledge about occupational health, and second by creating research and intervention approaches and methods aimed at reducing social and gender inequalities in occupational health.