Additionally, periods of disability due to job stress tend to be much longer than disability periods for other occupational injuries and illnesses. Occupational stress has negative effects for organizations and employers. Occupational stress contributes to turnover and absenteeism. Gender In today’s workplaces every individual will experience work-related stress and the level of stress varies person-to-person. Different aspects of a person’s life will affect their stress levels through work. In comparing women and men, there is a higher risk for women to experience stress, anxiety and others forms of psychological stress in response to their work life than there is for men due to societal expectations of women. Such as women having more domestic responsibilities, the fact that women receive less pay for doing similar work as men and that societally women are expected to say "yes" to any requests given to them. These societal expectations added into a work environment can create a very psychologically stressful environment for women, without any added stressors from work. Desmarais and Alksnis suggest two explanations for the greater psychological distress of women. First, the genders may differ in their awareness of negative feelings, leading women to be more likely to express and report strains, whereas men more likely to deny and inhibit such feelings. Second, the demands to balance work and family result in more overall stress for women that leads to increased strain. Stereotype threat is a phenomenon that can have effects on everyone, it highly depends on the situation the individual is. Some of the proposed mechanisms that are involved with stereotype threat include, but are not limited to: anxiety, negative cognition (where you are focused on stereotype-thinking), lowered motivation, lowered performance expectation (where you do worse on something because the expectation is that you won’t be able to do well anyways), decrease in working memory capacity, etc. Women are also more vulnerable to sexual harassment and assault than men. These authors are referring to the very real "double burden" hypothesis. In addition, women, on average, earn less than their male counterparts. According to a recent report by the European Union (EU), in the EU and affiliated countries the skills gap between men and women has narrowed in the ten years preceding 2015. In the EU, when compared to men, women typically spend fewer hours in paid work but instead spend more hours in unpaid work. Causes of occupational stress Both the