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Okay, I may be a minority here, but I can tell you that this is not reaction to women in the workplace at all.
If I am in a conversation with some other guys at work and a female colleague enters the room, I that does not make me feel hostility. No, "oh, now I have to watch my mouth, no more sexual innuendo, no more discussion of how fuckable common acquaintances are, no more innocent showing of nudes of my sex partners."
Because I do not engage in this kind of talk even when I am in an all-male setting. Not even when I hang out with my friends, actually. Now, perhaps I simply give off vibes which tell other men that I do not want to discuss tits with them during work hours, and every other man is suffering in silence every time I or a woman enter the room, but I think that is unlikely.
Regarding HR minefields, at least here in Europe the minefield seems easily navigable even for a spectrum-dweller like myself. Don't ask women for sexual favors at work, avoid touching your colleagues without their consent, don't send unsolicited dick pics.
Now I am sure that there are some women who would be offended by my workplace behavior ("he called that connector 'female' instead of 'socket-type', and he has not renamed his dev branch from master to main yet"), but thankfully, I have not encountered any at work yet.
Never said it did. Its not the occasional encounter with a female in the workspace that is the real issue. Its the tipping point when you are basically unable to avoid interacting with the female colleagues daily and the norms around 'professionalism' change with this reality.
If the work environment, the boundaries of 'professional' conduct are pretty much defined what the most easily offended coworker will tolerate. And the company will usually craft all of its personnel policies around mitigating the risk of offending said coworker.
What it actually means in practice is that you have to be careful about leveling critiques at female coworkers or suggesting they aren't performing adequately or even making jokes at their expense, since at any given time they can take offense to it and claim, e.g. 'discrimination' based on their gender, or hostile work environment, or claim your workplace has a general 'bro' culture.
And, of course, if you do end up finding one of your single female colleagues attractive, your options are:
A) Either stifle that feeling as hard as possible and hope that you can stay in contact if one or both of you leave the company; or
B) Put it all on the line to actually ask her out, which in the best case she reciprocates (although let's not talk about what happens if that situation sours) and in the worst she rejects and then interprets almost everything you do later as vindictive retaliation for the rejection until it becomes an HR complaint regardless of how you conduct yourself afterwards.
And the complications if you have a higher position than she does.
And being as polite as possible, do you spend much time in male-dominated group settings at all? Outside of work?
One of the key social dynamics for men (not universally, but almost) is 'line treading' by bringing up ever-more-controversial topics or making ever-more-edgy jokes until someone finally calls them out and says "whoah dude, too far." Then he apologizes, walks it back, and everyone going forward forgives them as long as they don't habitually step over that line in the future.
And the very instant an unvetted female enters the group, that line gets WAY more constrained, and the possible consequences for crossing it get way sharper. The men are no longer 'comfortable' pushing that boundary and it puts a strain on camaraderie.
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This is the thin edge of the wedge. The harmful stuff is where male normal aggressive communication is dispensed with because women don't really reciprocate it as well as men and this gradually escalates until you can't call ideas bad directly in meetings and need to catch up with the person pushing forward the bad idea in a one on one ect ect.
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A guy got fired after being overheard joking about his big dongle at a conference.
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And I can tell you it is, because the people making those rules outright said it is.
And not just the stuff you're referring to, that's just the motte. Also anything vaguely adjacent; the banning of Lena as a test image. Or objecting to certain memes ("Hide your kids, hide your wife"). And things not adjacent at all; objecting to talk of videogames and Star Trek. And also objecting to and banning communication styles common among men in the industry .
I am not saying that "predominantly female SJ employees take over a company, establish a woke regime of terror where lunch conversations about video games are banned" never happens.
But I do not think that this is the inevitable consequence of letting women enter the workforce.
Generally, I think that there is some optimal fraction of costs dedicated to workplace culture. In the zeroth approximation, that fraction is zero, because employees should just get their job done. But in higher orders, one would consider that the productivity of employees is a function of workspace culture, so there are gains to be had by investing in workplace culture (e.g. have a HR department to intervene on alleged assaults, make sure that employees are willing to talk to each other, etc).
Naturally, the gains of having a great workplace culture are finite: you can't solve P=NP by taking a few grad students and placing them in an extremely motivating environment.
Another consideration might be if things get more extreme in bullshit jobs than in non-bullshit jobs. After all, if the main purpose of your job is to be another person of the payroll of your department so that your head of department can maintain their political power against other departments, nobody will care much if you waste time playing stupid status games. If your job is actually contributing to the bottom line, then finding grievances to whine about will not improve your KPIs. Obviously one limit to that is anti-discrimination law which the company might run afoul of.
Still, managers who genuinely takes the concern of their employee about others talking about video games during lunch seriously, rather than mentally earmarking her as "going out of her way to find things to be offended by, downsize at earliest opportunity" are already not aligned to the corporate bottom line.
This is avoiding the question of what a good workplace culture is. Is it one where guys can wear T-shirts with Star Trek characters on them and talk about videogames, or is it one where this is disallowed because it makes women uncomfortable? Is it one where guys can get into a heated discussion on some technical manner, arguing and interrupting each other, or is it one where this is disallowed because women find it difficult to participate in such a free-for-all? Is it one where someone who says something ignorant or stupid can be called out, or one where their ignorance or stupidity is treated with kindness? Is it one where guys must constantly examining their language for "sexist" expressions (like the default male pronoun, or popular memes which reference rape) and making sure no technical matters are incidentally sexist (e.g. talking about male and female connectors, or a gender bender, or using a test image of an attractive woman)?
Because we've seen for decades -- and turned up to 11 in the last 15 years -- that this is what you get. It follows directly from having women in the workplace and specially protected from offense or anything that could be considered to make them uncomfortable.
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