Paid sick leave is more common, but employees are also more uncertain about when they should tap into their balance: Some 78% of private sector employees in the US now have access to paid sick leave (although the vast majority of low-wage workers still can’t take a paid sick day), according to a recent report from the Economic Policy Institute. However, businesses are still grappling with the question of when it’s a good time to allow employees to take a sick day, Axios says.

The culprit behind the upended norms? It’s the pandemic, stupid. The prevalence of work from home policies during the height of the pandemic blurred the lines between work and personal life, and many fully remote employees (and their employers) became accustomed to “working through mild symptoms,” Axios says.

We’ve (kind of) shifted back to normalcy, but nobody’s really sure how to approach sick leaves now — should we carry over WFH norms and expect to work through mild illness, or should we go back to the way things were and stay home when we get sick? For some employees, the rising threat of layoffs is a deterrent to taking personal time or sick leave. But for others, coworkers who show up to the office while sick are raising the chances of infecting those around them.

Enterprise’s take: If you’re feeling sick, stay home — even if that means working a regular day from home, rather than your office desk. It’s always best to limit the spread of whatever you have, especially during peak flu season, like this week, when there appears to be a toxic stew of everything from the common cold to the latest strain of covid and respiratory syncytial virus making the rounds. Nearly one third of folks here at Enterprise have been or are down this week with symptoms including aches, pains, chest infections, fever and (for some) vomiting — sending the rest of us into a work from home footing through week’s end.

The key is for managers + top brass to lead by example: “When executives say, ‘Hey, I’m sick and going to take the day off,’ that signals to people who work for them that it’s OK for them to take time off if they’re sick,” a managing partner at Workplace Intelligence, a research firm focused on the world of work, told Axios.

Being risk-averse pays out — at least as far as equity investments in Sweden go:Domestic stock portfolios picked by Swedish women outperformed their male counterparts by almost 50%, writes Bloomberg, citing data tracked by Euroclear Sweden on retail investors’ holdings. Women-run portfolios tend to favor more established firms compared to those run by men, who give preference to younger tech firms, Euroclear said. The difference between the two supports the hypothesis that “women investors, both on retail and institutional levels, are more risk-averse than men,” Bloomberg says.

Are women the more wary gender? The jury is still out on whether that’s fact or stereotype. “The statement women are more risk-averse than men is fundamentally a metaphysical assertion about unobservable essences or characteristics, and therefore cannot be empirically proven or disproven,” is the conclusion of an essay (pdf) by Tufts University Senior Research Fellow Julie Nelson, who puts widespread acceptance of the statement as “rooted more in confirmation bias than reality.” But there is other research that suggests that women have plenty of appetite for risk-taking — it’s just that they tend to take risks in specific contexts, including when it involves social risk.

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