Sexism Is Making You Sleepy

Finally, a persuasive argument for gender equality: Researchers have found that a country’s level of equality is linked to better sleep—for everyone, men included. Let’s alert the patriarchs and cross our fingers, I guess!

Researchers from the University of Melbourne crunched data from the United Nations’ gender empowerment index—which ranks countries on measures like the wage gap and the share of women legislators—as well as a prior survey of 14,000 people in 23 European countries. The researchers found that, on the whole, women’s sleep was more restless than men’s, and was more likely to be disrupted by having a child or an unemployed partner. As the researchers point out in a commentary for The Conversation:

Mothers are more likely to be called to comfort young children in the middle of the night and bring them back to bed. Mothers of teenagers are also more likely than fathers to stay up at night worrying about children’s safety or waiting for children to return home after curfews.

Men’s sleep, on the other hand, was more likely to be interrupted by worries about their own unemployment and household finances—a finding supported by prior research. All of which is to say, poor sleep seems to be roughly associated with responsibilities and stresses that fit a very retro model of women as caregivers and men as providers.

But, when the researchers considered the United Nations rankings, they found that countries rated higher on gender equality in political and professional spheres saw lower sleep disturbances. For example, in the Ukraine, which ranked lowest on gender equality, 16 percent of men and 22 percent of women experienced restless sleep, as Business Insider reports. Compare that to Norway, which ranked highest on gender equality, and saw three percent of men and nine percent of women report sleep disturbances.

The United Nations ranking considers gender equality in the world at large, not within the family, so you might question the relevance—but the researchers argue that their findings underscore “the importance of the national context in shaping the pattern of gender inequality in the domestic sphere.”

There’s no proof of causation here, just an association, but past research has found a similar link between gender equality and lower stress and greater happiness. “It is understandable why women’s sleep might be more troubled when they live in patriarchal societies,” the authors write with a no-duh. But, they add that “PATRIARCHY HARMS MEN TOO” (all-caps, mine) and explain, “Gender equality challenges hegemonic masculinity, giving men more freedoms to care for themselves, and this may extend to getting better sleep.” So, please, let us all agitate to get men the sleep they need.