FINDINGS of the Global Commission on Women’s Health show that identifying issues and problems in the occupational health of women remains a challenge.
Much of women’s work remains un-recognised, uncounted and unpaid. Women work in homes, in agriculture, food production and they also market home-made products, for example.
Within the paid labour force, women are disproportionately concentrated in the informal sector, beyond the scope of industrial regulations, trade unions, insurance or even data collection.
Women may undertake paid work at home, or combine part or full time paid work with household work and the care of children, the sick and the elderly.
They are likely to move in and out of the paid labour force during different life stages; within the paid labour force they  may have a variety of different occupations in succession.
Women’s occupations are thus fluid and multi-dimensional.
The first problem is to learn what those activities really involve in different situations and cultures — as the Global Commission on Women’s Health which was established in 1992 under the auspices of the World Health Organization (WHO) pits it, a simple occupational category is seldom sufficient as a basis for establishing specific health risk.
Agricultural workers may dig and hoe and apply fertilisers and pesticides, but not all the workers will perform all of those tasks and where the tasks are segregated by gender the health implications for men and women may be very different.
The tasks which men and women undertake vary from culture to culture, and at different times in different places. While most cultures assign particular tasks to women, and in some women’s roles are more regulated and their economic activities restricted, there are in general very few activities which can universally be described as women’s work.
Occupational health risks are seldom confined to one sex alone. The risks are only likely to be fully understood, and confronted, in the context of a gender specific analysis of occupational health.
Research into women’s and men’s occupational health also requires recognition of the extent of intra-sex variations and careful controls for biological and social characteristics, which may affect health outcomes.
Poor nutrition, for example, may be a more important  factor in some types of occupational health impairment than simply being female.
The effects of potential occupational hazards on women’s reproductive health have been, probably, the major focus of concern in the health of women workers.
This concern has increased in recent years as more environmental hazards are identified and as more women enter the paid workforce.
The World Health Organisation documents that a range of occupational reproductive hazards has been documented but a large number of possible risks still require further examination.
Legislation to protect pregnant-or potentially pregnant workers has been a universal response.
However, where such legislation ignores potential reproductive hazards to male workers it is not only scientifically unsound but fails to protect men while depriving women of an income.
Some countries cannot enforce their protective legislation because of the realities of economic pressures.
If other policies such as training criteria exclude women from learning to minimise the hazards they in fact face, women may paradoxically be at greater risk than if there had been no attempt to protect them.
The health of women is an important indicator of national development as the woman is the preserver of tradition and cultural heritage, manager of resources and rearer of future generation.
For instance, in tobacco cultivation, women play a crucial role starting from the selection of seeds through sowing, manuring, nursery bed raising, transplanting, harvesting, curing, stringing, grading and packing, etc. These operations are time consuming and they require lot of patience and skill. The long hours of productive physical labour causes exhaustion and drudgery among farmwomen.
Studies reveal a significant contribution of women labourers in every farm operation. Thus, it is recommended that certain strategies for the benefit of women workers in tobacco depending on the health hazards should be implemented.
This is so because the National Safety Council (NSC) consistently ranks agriculture as one of the three most hazardous occupations in many parts.
Although the death rate has declined 28 per cent during the last three decades for agricultural-related injuries in some countries, the report of National Institute of Occupational Health, ICMR (Indian Council of Medical Research) shows that there are still certain occupational health hazards in agriculture, which are harmful to the agrarian community.
Women workers predominantly located in the informal sector of some economies face extremely exploitative conditions of work, which generally lead to a number of health problems.
Literature on women workers in the informal sector focuses on their exploitative work relations, differential wages, and so on. Other findings expose some health hazards faced by workers in the all important commercial crop activities of growing tobacco.
It is it for this reasons that details should be documented relating to the human health and safety implications for female workers engaged in the agriculture sector who produce, handle, store, process or otherwise have contact with agricultural inputs or products.
There are health and safety implications that result from exposure to pesticides and chemicals and other inputs and outputs themselves.
In addition, there are differential exposures that result from production practices, worker skills and knowledge needed to produce agricultural products or use them as inputs during the production process.