Are women exposed to more cancer-causing chemicals than men?
All of us are exposed to low-levels of cancer-causing chemicals in the products we interact with on a daily basis. These exposures can add up to significantly increase our cancer risk, and women tend to encounter these chemicals more frequently than men.
Important sources of these harmful exposures include cleaning products and personal care products like makeup, hair products, skincare products, and fragrances.
Cancer-causing chemicals in cleaning products include things like ethylbenzene, styrene, and petroleum distillates. Regular exposure to these chemicals raises our cancer risk: Research shows that women who have worked as maids or housekeepers for more than 7 years have a 76% increased risk of lung cancer.1
It isn’t just professional cleaners who have more contact with these chemicals. Overall, women still do more cleaning than men. A recent study found that even in heterosexual marriages where women earn more than their husbands, wives spend almost 3.5 hours more per week on caregiving and household chores than their husbands,2 putting women into contact with chemicals that raise our cancer risk on a more regular basis.
Many personal care products like makeup, fragrance, skincare, nail care, and hair care products also contain chemicals that raise our cancer risk like hydroquinone, ethylene dioxide, 1,4-dioxane, formaldehyde, nitrosamines, and acrylamide.
These exposures can also add up. Research has shown that someone who has worked as a hairstylist for at least 10 years is almost twice as likely to develop bladder cancer as someone who has never worked as a hairstylist,3 and that levels of cancer-causing chemicals in nail salons can be higher than those typically seen in oil refineries, and nail technicians face cancer risk more than 130 times higher than people who don’t work in nail salons.4
Women who use these products occasionally face lower levels of cancer risk than people who work with them every day, but women overall still face higher exposures than men. Women apply an average of 168 chemicals to their faces, hair, and bodies every day — more than twice as many as men5 — and a growing body of research suggests that these chemicals interact in our bodies in ways that can multiply cancer risk beyond just their added effects6.
Women of color are particularly at risk. Research has shown that personal care products marketed to women of color contain higher levels of toxic chemicals, and that women of color are more likely to work in professions like hair styling and cleaning that put them into more regular contact with these chemicals.7
There are some steps we can take to minimize our exposure to these chemicals. Organizations like the Anti-Cancer Lifestyle Program and the Environmental Working Group offer free tools to help select safer personal care and cleaning products. But carefully avoiding toxic chemicals in household products is an additional burden for women, who already do a disproportionate amount of household shopping and labor. This burden could be alleviated if we did a better job of regulating these chemicals — particularly in the United States.
Many of the chemicals in cosmetics, personal care products, and cleaning products that raise our cancer risk have been banned or restricted in other parts of the world, but are still legal in the US.8 For example, the EU has banned or restricted more than 1,300 chemicals in cosmetics, while the US has regulated just 11.9
Fortunately, efforts to change this are already underway. Groups like Silent Spring Institute, the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, the Cancer Free Economy Network, and Breast Cancer Prevention Partners are leading the charge for better chemical regulation to protect women from cancer risk. We can protect ourselves from harmful exposures by supporting their efforts and letting our lawmakers know this issue is important to us.
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KRISTINA MARUSIC is an award-winning journalist at Environmental Health Sciences who covers environmental health and justice at EHN.org and DailyClimate.org. Her research into cancer-causing chemicals and exposures lead to her new book, A New War on Cancer: The Unlikely Heroes Revolutionizing Prevention (Island Press / May 11, 2023 / $28). Kristina holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of San Francisco, and her personal essays and reporting have been published by outlets including CNN, Slate, Vice, Women's Health, The Washington Post, MTV News, The Advocate, and Bustle, among others.
References
1. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48501327
2. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/women-breadwinners-tripled-since-1970s-still-doing-more-unpaid-work
4. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0269749118346487?via%3Dihub#!
6. Goodson, William H., Leroy Lowe, Michael Gilbertson, and David O. Carpenter. “Testing the Low Dose Mixtures Hypothesis from the Halifax Project.” Reviews on Environmental Health 35 (4): 333–57. https://doi.org/10.1515/reveh-2020-0033.
7. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34936409/
8. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/22/chemicals-in-cosmetics-us-restricted-eu
9. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/22/chemicals-in-cosmetics-us-restricted-eu
