Stress at work is not a personal problem. It is an organisational one.
A recent study by occupational health services HumanCapitalCare and ArboNed found that stress-related absenteeism among women in the Netherlands was twice as high as among men in 2025. Stress now accounts for 26 percent of all sick days in the country. The number keeps rising every year.
We see the effects of this in the organisations we work with. A high-performing woman quietly burning out while carrying more than her share. A leadership team that frames the problem as individual resilience, not organisational design. A manager who means well but genuinely does not see what his female colleagues are navigating every day.
The data points to seven recurring stress factors for women at work. The common thread across all of them: more pressure, less reward, and less room to manoeuvre.
The work itself is harder
Women are significantly overrepresented in jobs with high demands and low autonomy. Think nursing, primary education, care work. These roles are not just demanding in workload. They require sustained emotional labour, constant regulation, and very little control over how the work gets done. Absenteeism in these sectors is well above average, and women make up more than 80 percent of the workforce in both.
The pay gap is real and it causes stress
Financial pressure is a direct driver of stress. Women in the Netherlands earn on average 10.5 percent less per hour than men. Even when you correct for experience, age, and role, women in the private sector still earn 6.9 percent less. That gap is not abstract. It lands in people's bank accounts every month.
Unpaid work at home does not disappear
Even in households where both partners work equal hours, planning, coordination, and mental load still fall disproportionately on women. Research consistently links this to higher rates of stress and burnout. The workday does not end when women leave the office.
Non-promotable tasks accumulate
At work, women are more frequently asked to take on tasks that are necessary but do not lead to better reviews or promotions. Writing reports, joining committees, onboarding new colleagues. Saying no carries a higher social cost for women than for men. The result is a quiet accumulation of work that advances the organisation but not the person doing it.
Boundary violations are more common
In 2023, 21 percent of working women experienced some form of transgressive behaviour at work, compared to 13 percent of men. Intimidation, humiliation, aggression. The toll of navigating this, and the emotional energy spent managing it, rarely shows up in productivity metrics.
Bias is structural, not exceptional
Studies consistently show that women are assessed as less competent than men with comparable backgrounds. When women become mothers, the bias intensifies and opportunities decrease. This is not a matter of individual bad actors. It is a structural pattern that creates chronic stress over time.
What we see in practice
We regularly work with organisations where stress-related absence is treated as a problem that belongs to the individual. The assumption is that people who struggle are not resilient enough, or are dealing with personal circumstances that fall outside the organisation's responsibility.
That framing is not just unhelpful. It is inaccurate.
Chronic stress is a physiological response to sustained pressure. It is real, it is measurable, and in many cases it is directly caused by how work is organised. When the conditions at work systematically overload one group more than another, that is an organisational problem. It requires an organisational response.
Three things worth doing now:
First, examine your blind spots. Men, including us, tend to underestimate what women navigate at work and how much their own careers have been supported by a partner's unpaid labour at home.
Second, look critically at your organisation's practices. Many standard policies quietly advantage employees who have no caregiving responsibilities outside of work. That is not neutral. It is a structural choice.
Third, take the legal framework seriously. Employees do not want resilience training. They want work to be organised in a way that reduces stress for everyone. That is not a favour. It is a legal obligation under Dutch health and safety law.
The undercurrent in most organisations around gender and stress is rarely named directly. It runs beneath performance reviews, workload distributions, and team dynamics. Making it visible is the first step toward doing something about it.
That is exactly the kind of work we do.