Absence during pregnancy in the Danish workforce: occupational, industrial, and temporal trends in a nationwide register-based cohort study

OBJECTIVES: This study aimed to describe occupational, industrial, and temporal trends in relation to absence during pregnancy in the Danish workforce.

METHODS: The register-based national cohort DOC*X-Generation was used to identify all pregnancies among women (18-50 years) engaged in regular employment in Denmark 1998-2018. The cohort holds individual-level data on occupations coded according to the Danish versions of the International Standard Classification of Occupations and of EU's nomenclature (NACE, revision 2). Data on absence from work was retrieved from the Danish Register for Evaluation and Marginalization. The study population comprised 884 616 pregnancies in 547 870 women.

RESULTS: In 48% of the included pregnancies, the women had at least one week with registered absence with a median of 8 weeks (5-95% percentile; 1-27 weeks). The highest frequencies of absence were observed among painters (75%) and women in the meat products manufacturing industry (68%), whereas the lowest were seen among professionals in physics, mathematics, engineering, and architecture (30%) and in the research and university education industry (32%). The difference between the lowest and highest number of cumulated weeks with absence was 9 weeks. From 1998-2018, the proportion of pregnancies with registered absence decreased, whereas the extent of absence per pregnancy increased.

CONCLUSIONS: Absence during pregnancy was consistently high over time, but with vast differences across occupations and industries. A deeper understanding of underlying reasons for pregnancy-related absence is essential to develop targeted strategies for reducing absence, such as providing better opportunities for adjustments of work task early in pregnancy or other tailored interventions.