What Your Make-Do Workspace Is Doing To Your Health: Hidden Cost For Women

Women often operate in temporary, shared, or improvised workspaces in many homes and offices. A chair for eating becomes a chair for working. A laptop is on a low table or a bed. Throughout the day, work moves from the desk to the sofa to the kitchen counter. Most people agree that this culture of adjustment is useful. People don't talk about the physical cost very often.

Most workplaces still rely on standard furniture sizes and layouts. These are usually based on average body measurements that do not reflect women’s proportions. Height, seat depth, armrest width, and reach distance vary widely. When work furniture cannot adapt, the body must. Over time, small daily stress turns into pain that comes back.

Design Flaws and Physical Stress

Furniture that does not fit will always cause problems. If a chair is too high, your feet will hang off the edge and put pressure on your thighs. If the desk is too high, it makes your shoulders go up, and your wrists bend in strange ways.

If you put a screen too high or too low, it can cause your neck to bend and your upper back to hurt. Women who work at desks tend to have more neck and shoulder pain than men. Poor placement of the keyboard and mouse can also cause strain in the wrist and forearm. These complaints come from using workstations that do not fit the body properly.

Shared workstations make the problem worse. In a lot of offices, desks and chairs are not put back in their places after each use. At home, one table is often shared by family members with different heights and body types. When the setup does not match the person using it, discomfort and strain begin to build.

The Double Load of Working from Home

Hybrid work has reduced commute time for many women, but it has also blurred physical boundaries. People often do both paid work and housework in the same room and with the same furniture.

There is often no dedicated workstation. Changing tasks often means changing posture too, and usually for the worse, with quick emails from the couch, calls taken while hunched over a phone, and reports finished at the edge of a bed.

Pregnancy and the time after giving birth put even more physical stress on the body. During this time, the load on the spine, the stability of the joints, and the balance of the muscles all change. Discomfort rises quickly, and recovery slows down when there isn't enough support for the seat and back.

Tiredness, Focus, And Health Signs That Aren't Obvious

Bad posture when sitting hurts more than just your back and neck. It changes how you breathe. A collapsed chest makes it harder for the lungs to expand and makes you take shallow breaths. Getting less oxygen affects how much energy you have and how clear your mind is.

When your hips and thighs are compressed for hours, your circulation also suffers. Muscles get tired more quickly. By the afternoon, stiffness gets worse. A lot of workers say they are just tired and don't connect it to their seating or posture.

People often get used to pain and work through it. Women are more likely to put off getting help for musculoskeletal pain and deal with the symptoms on their own. It is harder to fix the problem once treatment is sought.

People often see ergonomic support as an upgrade instead of a must-have. Budget choices favour furniture that is the same size over furniture that can be changed. Health and safety checks mostly look at the floor space and lighting, but not so much at how well the body fits.

Fixes that work are not hard or expensive. Chairs that let you change the height, seat depth, and lumbar support help you sit up straighter. Footrests help shorter people.

External keyboards and laptop risers fix the height of the screen. Armrests that move take some of the weight off your shoulders. Taking breaks to move around often helps with stiffness and compression.

You shouldn't think of workstation fit as a way to make yourself more comfortable. When a lot of workers are in physical pain, it shows up in higher absenteeism, higher medical costs, and lower productivity.

Article by Harsh Wadhwani, Founder of Vergo. Views expressed by the author are their own.