Women Beware: Job Stress Will Turn You Into Dudes

According to the Daily Mail, working too much can cause women to get “men’s” ailments like heart failure and low libido. We didn’t know those were just for men.

The Daily Mail‘s Isla Whitcroft (whose piece was also picked up over here by the Daily News) profiles Kay McCaw, who suffered three heart attacks in one particularly stressful day. Writes Whitcroft, “While it’s well-known that job stress is linked to heart problems in men, as the Mail reported last week, researchers have found it affects women, too.” You don’t say! McCaw also reports that, “My cardiologist told me that women are particularly at risk of heart attacks because they refuse to listen to their body, and push themselves to the limit in order to please other people.” Might they also be especially vulnerable because their symptoms and pathology differ from the conventional understanding of how heart disease works, an understanding based mainly on men’s illness?

No matter — Whitcroft is more interested in telling us about all the other dude diseases we could get. These range from gout to hair loss to low libido, the last of which is something pretty much every other mainstream media outlet considers a women’s problem. Given that she’s writing in the Mail, we wouldn’t really expect Whitcroft to go into why these ailments are thought of as male-only when many women have suffered from them for some time, or to critique the diagnosis and treatment of women’s illnesses based on research conducted on men. We would, however, like to point out that being told they have a “men’s” disease might make women extra stressed-out.

Image via Edw/Shutterstock.com.

Flagging Libido. Gout. Heart Attacks. They Used To Be Male Problems. So Why Are So Many Women Getting ‘Men’s’ Diseases? [Daily Mail]
More Women Are Getting Disorders Traditionally Thought Of As ‘Men’s’ Diseases [NY Daily News]