Across the board, he says, women spend 30% to 50% more of their working time above heat-stress thresh­olds than men. In con­struc­tion, when com­paring men and women doing the same job, the figure rises to around 50%.
The rea­sons, he says, are struc­tural. Women often wear more clothing for the same job. Men are more con­fi­dent asking for breaks. And where men’s work is vis­ibly stren­uous, it’s rec­og­nized as a heat risk and rewarded with rest. But women’s work is steadier, less obvi­ously pun­ishing, and gets no such relief.
Parsons com­pares it to the dif­fer­ence between a plane crash and asbestos expo­sure: One is a sudden, vis­ible catas­trophe, the other a slow, con­stant harm that’s easy to miss. “Male heat stress tends to be this taller risk, where you get rel­a­tively vis­ible moments of phys­ical dis­tress that can be man­aged,” he says. “Female heat stress is con­stantly there, but much less vis­ible, because it doesn’t have those same obvious peaks in the working day.”

Next time you look at a dis­abled person and think we might be lazy or slow, stop and con­sider the unpaid labour in the back­ground that we have to com­plete to sur­vive.

As in his pre­vious films, Nolan is inter­ested in the dis­con­ti­nu­ities of space and time, in magic, tricks, craft, tech­nology, rivalry, sub­sti­tu­tion, masks, mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tion, what we remember and what we choose to forget. Yet again, sur­vival is por­trayed as a kind of tri­umph. Yet again, there are long, claus­tro­phobic scenes of drowning and near-drowning, and tech­ni­cally impres­sive episodes in which build­ings are engulfed in flames and vehi­cles explode. Yet again, we watch a male char­acter’s des­perate quest to recover and/or avenge a female love object. I had hoped that Nolan’s affinity with these Homeric themes might push him to new cre­ative heights, and enable him to con­jure more believ­able char­ac­ters. But The Odyssey fea­tures his usual com­bi­na­tion of grandiosity and super­fi­ciality. Without a tub of wax for my ears – which Himesh Patel’s ever anx­ious Eurylochus, Odysseus’s doomed right-hand man, uses to sail safely past the Sirens – I was exposed to the full din of thumping sticks, staffs, swords and clashing armour, thun­der­bolts, crashing waves, grunts, screams, top­pling palaces and burning tem­ples. But unlike Matt Damon, the wax-free Odysseus who is tied to the mast as he is con­veyed past the Sirens (naked ladies reclining on some uncom­fort­able-looking rocks), I gazed at the ship­wrecks and blood­baths without any agony of emo­tion. My eyes stayed dry, even for Argos the dog – whose adorable­ness as a puppy is pre­dictably amped up to suit our animal-loving times. If only the human char­ac­ters had been treated with such serious atten­tion.