I am a woman. I am willing to take on a great deal of stress. Hell, just raising my special needs kids while supporting my husband's military career was a lot of stress. My subjective experience of corporate life was not that work was too stressful for me or caused conflict with my parenting obligations, but that I frequently faced what amounted to sexual harassment from men in positions of power above me. When you are looking for a promotion, you are probably not dealing with people who only see you as a piece of ass. For me, this was the single biggest thing I was aware of as an obstacle to progression and it was the single most stressful work-related issue I had to deal with.

I processed accident claims for a living. Many of my coworkers found it stressful to read the medical and police reports that were part and parcel of the job 8 hours a day. I rarely was bothered by that. Once in a great while something particularly gruesome would disturb me. But the degree to which I felt I had to walk on eggshells to simultaneously avoid offending some man with a hard-on for me AND avoid anything that could be interpreted as encouragement of his interest was a tightrope walk I was happy to give up when I left my corporate job.

I don't have time to read the full report we are discussing, but what little I did read of it makes me wonder at the details of what causes other women to feel that it is all just too stressful. I get the impression, both from what I read of the article and some of the comments here, that the expectation of stress is sort of hand-wavy as to what the exact causes were. I know they are legion, but now that my kids are adults and I am divorced (etc) and I have arranged my life such that work can be the most important thing I focus on, I still find it challenging to cope with the fact that so many men see me as just a skirt. When a man sees me that way, it matters little whether he is hoping to get into my panties or not, he will take me seriously as a professional and he will never be a stepping stone to better things for me. He will either be a closed door because he doesn't take me seriously or he will be an even bigger obstacle and source of pain, while I try to neutralize the threat his unwanted sexual interest represents for me.

This is something you likely almost never face as a man in the world of work.