Working (hours other than) 9 to 5
Celebrating women who challenged traditional roles and working hours
American country singer, philanthropist, and feminist icon Dolly Parton released her 23rd album, entitled 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs, in 1980. The titular song on the album also served as theme song for the movie “Nine to Five”, which starred Dolly, Lily Tomlin, and Jane Fonda as a trio of secretaries who mutiny against their boss to improve the workplace. The song and the movie were both inspired by an actual women's labor organization that started in 1973 among a group of secretaries in Boston. They called themselves the "9to5" based on the typical working hours for clerical workers at that time. If you want to learn more about the song, the movie, and the movement, check out NPR’s Planet Money episode.
As wonderful as it is to pay tribute to the legacy of the late, great Dolly Parton (January 19, 1946 – August 25, 2026) the real focus of this blog post is to talk about the women who work hours other than 9 to 5. In the United States, almost 15% of employed women work non-daytime schedules; the rate is 17% in the European Union [1, 2]. Who are these women? Some of them work in industries that have a long history of women working odd hours. Nurses, waitresses, flight attendants, or housekeeping jobs may come to mind. Some of them work in male-dominated fields like firefighting or construction. Women are first responders, active duty military, hotel receptionists... long story short, women are working in any job you can imagine.
The nursing profession serves as a great example of a female-dominated field that has conducted significant research into worker fatigue. 85% of nurses worldwide are women [3]. Nurses deal with stressful work environments, heavy workload, non-standard work schedules, and long hours. It is estimated that 1/3 of nurses globally are experiencing symptoms of burnout [4]. Unfortunately, we are also in the midst of a global nursing shortage [3]. Hospitals prioritize staffing over hours limitations, with many hospitals resorting to tactics like mandatory overtime instead of adopting duty-hour limitations or other rules that may protect against fatigue.
Nurses helped shape another female-dominated shift working profession—cabin crew. One early aviatrist by the name of Ellen Church couldn’t get a job as a pilot but leveraged her expertise as a nurse to convince the airline to hire women to serve as “airline hostesses” back in 1930 [5]. Much has changed about the role of cabin crew in commercial aviation since the 1930s, but it remains a female-dominated occupation. 70% of cabin crewmembers are estimated to be women [6]. Cabin crew deal with odd working hours, jet lag, high workload (both physically and mentally), and the occasional unruly passenger. Many airlines engage in fatigue risk management efforts for cabin crew, but their fatigue is frequently overshadowed by that of pilots. While Captain Chresten Wilson recently became the first woman ever to hold the title of senior-most pilot at United Airlines [7], piloting is still male-dominated. Only 6% of non-student pilots worldwide are women [8] even though women have shaped the field of aviation from the very beginning. We all remember the Wright brothers, but did you know that there was a Wright sister too? Katharine Wright accompanied her brothers on their first demonstration flights, and supported her brothers financially. Wilbur Wright is quoted as saying, "If ever the world thinks of us in connection with aviation, it must remember our sister".[9]
Women shift workers face unique problems compared to their male counterparts. Some are biological. Hormones will affect your sleep and performance at every stage of life. I recently attended the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Research Conference on Sleep and the Health of Women (SHOW). During the conference, one physician quipped, “In medical school, I learned that men are normal people and women are normal people with all these extra hormonal states that just makes them impossible to understand. First you get your period, then you’re pregnant, then you’re perimenopausal, then you’re menopausal—when do I get to be a person?” The bad news is that medical understanding of women’s biology is woefully behind that of men. The good news is that many researchers are working to close that gap.
Other issues that women face aren’t related to biology at all, but are due to gender inequality. Women experience a heap of potentially life-threatening challenges when they work in male-dominated industries, from improperly fitting protective gear [10] to potential acts of violence from their coworkers [11]. Still more issues are related to women’s role in society outside of work. Women are traditionally expected to take on more caretaking responsibilities outside of work. Shift work and flexible schedules enable women to do paid labor without sacrificing time spent on unpaid work at home [12]. Working by night and caring by day leaves very little time for rest [13].
One thing that studies on fatigue in any shift-working occupation have in common is that they all come to the same conclusion—we need to do more at the organizational level to address sleep deprivation and burnout. That is easier said than done. Regulations and rule-based approaches can only get you so far. Biomathematical models like SAFTE-FAST can also help organizations come up with creative solutions to mitigate fatigue without reducing overall coverage. In the interest of time, I will restrain myself from going into detail about all the ways that SAFTE-FAST as part of a fatigue risk management system can improve shift worker performance since that topic makes up the bulk of my previous blog posts.
How should we adjust the model for women? The short answer is: we don’t need to. SAFTE-FAST is used by organizations to assess cognitive fatigue risk across the worker population as a function of sleep, time of day, and (when configured) workload. Women may experience more fatigue than men due to factors outside the scope of operational demands, but currently studies do not show any sizable difference in cognitive impairment due to sleep loss between men and women shiftworkers [13]. Women and men both require about 8 hours of sleep on average [14]. Therefore, the assumptions made by SAFTE-FAST about sleep duration and its impact on performance apply equally to men and women based on what we know right now.
We could adjust the model to reflect some of the issues women shift workers experience on average: increased workload, shortened sleep opportunities, and/or reduced sleep quality at the population level. Changing the AutoSleep assumptions and configuring Workload can be done in collaboration with an organization’s fatigue risk management team and SAFTE-FAST account representative, usually following data collection. We do not recommend adjusting the model based on individual experience or without consultation. Also keep in mind, modeling gender disparities won’t be as effective as a fatigue risk management strategy as would be addressing the disparities directly through organizational and societal reforms.
References
1. Klink, U., et al., Night shift work and dietary behaviors: a comparative analysis of European night shift and day workers from the SHIFT2HEALTH online survey. Nutrition Journal, 2026. 25(1): p. 43.
2. Workers by shift usually worked and selected characteristics, averages for the period 2024-2025. September 24, 2026
United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. Available from: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/flex2.t07.htm. 3. Nursing and midwifery, W.H. Organization, Editor. 2026: Fact Sheets. Available from: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/nursing-and-midwifery.
4. Getie, A., et al., Global prevalence and contributing factors of nurse burnout: an umbrella review of systematic review and meta-analysis. BMC nursing, 2025. 24(1): p. 596.
5. Ellen Church and the Advent of the Sky Girls. faa.gov. Available from: https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/about/history/pioneers/Ellen_Church_and_the_Advent_of_the_Sky_Girls.pdf.
6. Wen, C.C., et al., Fatigue and sleep in airline cabin crew: a scoping review. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2023. 20(3): p. 2652.
7. Fore, P., Meet Chresten Wilson, the airline captain set to become United’s most senior female pilot ever—the job pays $400K and doesn’t require a college degree, in Fortune. 2026. Available from: https://fortune.com/2026/03/13/chresten-wilson-united-airlines-captain-most-senior-first-woman-ever-six-figure-salary-no-college-degree/.
8. Women Pilot Statistics: Female Representation in Aviation, in Pilot Institute. 2023. Available from: https://pilotinstitute.com/women-aviation-statistics/.
9. 100 Most Influential Women in the Aviation and Aerospace Industry. Available from: https://www.wai.org/100-most-influential-women-in-the-aviation-and-aerospace-industry.
Onyebeke, L.C., et al., Access to properly fitting personal protective equipment for female construction workers. Am J Ind Med, 2016. 59(11): p. 1032-1040. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27346435.
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