As regards health care for women, we need to develop and study interventions to help highly educated women cope with their strains and to help balance their energy. And last but not least, workplace violence needs to be studied and targeted, in particular in health care and in education. Implications for practice Highly educated women are generally satisfied with their work. Moreover, our finding that highly educated women have high levels of fatigue does not contradict former findings that

women, including older women, experience their lives as positive and meaningful (Boelens 2007; Gordon et al. 2002). There is, however, some room for improvement. As regards the organizational level, workplace violence must be addressed for instance

by raising awareness, assertiveness training, alarm systems, and counseling. Family–friendly policies focusing on child care learn more are not sufficient for older women who start having responsibilities for caring for their own parents within the context of large jobs. Our findings may also have implications for health care for highly educated women with fatigue complaints. HSP inhibitor In particular, women with stress problems may benefit from active coaching to change stressful interactions at work (Van Veldhoven 2008; Verdonk et al. 2008). In the Netherlands, expectations for the future are that the female workforce will continue to grow and will demonstrate even higher

levels of education. Extrapolating our findings to this future scenario, our findings imply a strong call for attention: work-related fatigue in highly educated women needs a firm place on the policy, research, and occupational health care agenda. Conflict of interest The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial Phosphoglycerate kinase use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. References Abramson Z (2007) Masked symptoms: mid-life women, health, and work. Can J Aging 26:295–304CrossRef Åkerstedt T, Knutsson A, Westerholm P, Theorell T, Alfredsson L, Kecklund G (2004) Mental fatigue, work and sleep. J Psychosom Res 57:427–433. doi:10.​1016/​j.​jpsychores.​2003.​12.​001 CrossRef Baines D (2006) Staying with people who slap us click here around: gender, juggling responsibilities and violence in paid (and unpaid) care work. Gend Work Organ 13:129–151. doi:10.​1111/​j.​1468-0432.​2006.​00300.​x CrossRef Bakker AB, Demerouti E, Schaufeli WB (2002) Validation of the Maslach Burnout inventory—general survey: an internet study. Anxiety Stress Coping 15:246–260. doi:10.