摘要：The paper explores and analyses the age and gender differences relating work ability in active workers from the Portuguese industry, aiming to achieve general trends that allow the industrial safety design to be based on evidence from research. It were encompassed 621 workers (386 men and 235 women) with ages between 20 and 65 years old. It was used the Work Ability Index (WAI) to measure the individual work ability (WA).The data show that generally the WAI decreases with age, and data visual analyses suggests that there are some periods in life that differences between genders are more pronounced. The workforce vulnerability age bands identified according to gender are: i) 25-34; ii) 40-44 and iii) 60-64.The main reasons for work absence and its duration between genders are also distinct according to the age band in analyses. The men propensity is higher for accidents that lead to lesions in legs/foots and upper limbs, and on the other hand women show more back injury from accident and musculoskeletal injuries related to work and are diagnosed more commonly with slight mental disorders or problems (for example, slight depression, tension, anxiety, insomnia). If we look into the absence to work duration, there are some patterns that are different between genders, e.g. absence superior to 100 days per year are only present in women in the bands 25-34 and 40-44; on the age band 40-44, 33% of the women have from 1 to 24 day absence per year and men 28%, 67% of the women and 72% of the men didn’t miss work. Some of the trends identified might be consistent with maternity leave and family support, accident and sickness vulnerability. General directions for maximizing industrial safety interventions results arise and are discussed in this study, namely the resilience engineering approach aiming the design of healthy workplaces.
