Researcher Anne Marchand, a historian and sociologist at Sorbonne Paris Nord and co-director of the French research programme GISCOP93 (Seine-Saint-Denis, France), estimates that around 6,000 breast cancer cases a year in France could potentially be recognised as occupational. She said this in an interview with trade publication actuEL-HSE, prompted by a new book on work and breast cancer that she coordinated. GISCOP93 has studied since 2002 how occupational cancer arises and why it is often insufficiently recognised.
What has the research revealed?
According to Marchand, occupational cancer in women remains structurally underexposed. Research into work-related health risks has historically focused mainly on male, industrial occupations, while exposure in female-dominated sectors such as cleaning, care work and light industry received less attention. GISCOP93 speaks in this context of “invisible” forms of occupational disease: repetitive and physically demanding work in which chemical exposure is often not recognised as such, let alone reported or recognised by social security systems. Importantly, the 6,000 figure is a population-level estimate, not a count of individual diagnoses. For any single patient it is almost never possible to say with certainty whether her cancer was caused by work; the figure mainly makes visible a possible problem of underreporting.
Which exposures play a role?
In the research literature, various substances that workers come into contact with are linked to a possibly increased risk of breast cancer, including solvents, certain disinfecting and cleaning agents, and substances that can act as endocrine disruptors. Working conditions such as night work and shift work also recur in the research as possible risk factors. GISCOP93 therefore maps the complete occupational history of cancer patients, so that exposure patterns that currently often remain out of view become visible.
Context
GISCOP93’s findings align with international insights on the underestimation of occupational cancer. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), part of the World Health Organization, classified night work involving disruption of the circadian rhythm in 2019 as “probably carcinogenic to humans” (Group 2A), with breast cancer among the outcomes studied. IARC assessed the evidence in humans as limited, in experimental animals as sufficient, and the mechanistic evidence as strong; a classification speaks to the strength of the evidence for a hazard, not to the size of the risk for an individual worker. Such classifications underline that the question of occupational cancer in women is relevant worldwide, not only in France: in many countries, systematic registration of occupational exposure among female workers is lacking, leading to structural underreporting of recognised occupational diseases.
What does this mean for the recognition of occupational diseases?
The research feeds calls for more attention to the occupational history of women with cancer, and for revising recognition criteria for occupational diseases, which are now often tailored to male occupations with clearly delineated exposure, such as asbestos in construction. For women, exposure is more often diffusely spread across multiple low-paid jobs, which complicates the evidence needed for recognition. Better insight into these exposures is seen as a precondition for improving prevention and giving affected workers access to appropriate compensation, in France and beyond.
Source: Interview Anne Marchand (GISCOP93): “environ 6.000 cancers du sein pourraient [être d’origine professionnelle]”, 5 October 2026
Further research: IARC classification of night work as probably carcinogenic (Group 2A, IARC Monographs Volume 124, 2019); background information on GISCOP93 and the book “Ce que le travail fait à la santé. Au cœur de l’épidémie de cancer du sein” (“What work does to health. At the heart of the breast cancer epidemic”, Éditions de l’Atelier), 2 October 2026.
