The Most Dangerous Occupations; Men: The Scientific Truth; Scientific American Presents; by Wong; 1 Page(s)

If you're destined to die on the job, odds are overwhelmingly good that you're a man. Although women make up nearly half of the workforce, they account for only about 8 percent of the 6,000 or so annual job-related fatalities tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Why this difference? The answer is less tightly linked to a male craze for death-defying occupations than one might think.

Bomb squad technicians, plague fighters, volcanologists-the list goes on-risk death routinely. But because few people are employed in these lines of work, the absolute number of casualties is quite small; thus, the BLS and other agencies do not include these data. Deaths rack up far more ominously among transportation workers, construction workers and other laborers. Those are not jobs that women typically occupy.