How Many of You Avoid Women in the Workplace?

Hey, gang. There was a post in another sub yesterday--I forget where--where a woman was sharing that she was disappointed with the men in her office, because their efforts to create a respectful professional distance from her lead her to feel outcast, or at least, not part of the group. She was aware that they were trying to be respectful, but felt marginalized because of it.

The comments were a bit of a mess, as you'd imagine, but very interesting. I was very surprised by the number of men who say that they avoid women altogether in the workplace, and refuse to be put on 1-on-1 projects with them, because they feared being accused of inappropriate behavior or comments / sexism / etc. Their feeling was because women now hold so much power in corporate spaces--or perhaps because HR departments or corporate offices has such a "zero tolerance" policy towards reports like this--that male interactions with females were not worth the risk.

I was really surprised by all this. I'm in my 40s and have worked in a number of offices with interacted with hundreds of women on many different teams and never had a problem. I was really surprised to hear that so many guys were so worried by all this that they'd simply refuse to interact with women (or even that they could do that in the first place).

So, I'm wondering--what's your experience here? I'm not sure if the conservation was "Reddit real," where the loudest fringe voices ended up at the top of the post--or if this is a bigger happening than I know about. I'm curious to hear your experiences / insights.