Questions related to a research intervention carried out with female and male public school workers

This article presents a health intervention-research project done with workers in Brazilian public schools. Health, as we understand it, is linked both to the way in which we live and to our capacity to change that way of life. We emphasize the critical importance of initiating dialogue between research professionals and workers (co-investigators) in order to understand and transform work situations. We highlight the effects of debates about gender relations that led to work transformations. Such debates made it easier for workers and researchers to understand that men and women experience job requirements differently. We found that some staff favored reproduction of a sexually differentiated school system. These debates also allowed male and female workers to make their family members aware of difficulties in their work, unknown to society in general. We considered how to expand this research process, including examples of how the work was transformed.