You may already know that in straight couples with children, a “leisure gap” exists between mothers and fathers.
Men tend to have five more hours of relaxing per week than mothers, with gaps widening most on weekends.
And now, a new study from none other than NASA has found people are less likely to notice when women ― who often need more sleep than men ― are tired, versus their male counterparts.
That was partly because women remained attentive while exhausted, the researchers suggest, while men put on less of an engaged face while wiped out.
How did NASA find that?
The scientists wanted to find out how we can tell when an astronaut is tired because working while sleepy is linked to an increased risk of accidents.
So they asked men and women to rate their level of exhaustion. They then had a five-minute conversation with someone afterwards which was recorded and a muted version was shown to observers.
The people looking at the videos had to decide how tired they thought the women and men holding the conversation were based on their body language.
Participants underestimated peoples’ level of fatigue in both cases, but they thought women were less tired than men.
They underestimated men’s level of fatigue by 0.9 points and women’s by 1.3 points.
Researchers say that this may be because women were more expressive and attentive during conversation than men when they were tired (in the study, women reported more fatigue than men, even though it was perceived less).
That means people might have a biased perception when it comes to assessing how tired women are.
Why do women tend to seem more engaged when tired than men?
It’s hard to say why women were more responsive to conversations while tired, or why people perceived their tiredness less ― and the study doesn’t attempt to answer why that could be.
But a 2023 paper found that women who are perceived as less “warm” personally by colleagues suffer professionally.
Women are also punished more for real or perceived bad behaviour than men in the workplace, some research suggests.
Given that this study sought to find signs of sleepiness in a professional setting, there may be pretty science-backed reasons for women to seem more attentive than men did.
Still, for now, all that this study has shown is that we need to “help mitigate these biases in practice.”