Men, Women and Sleep

let me tell you a little bit about what we found in the study
we use data from the nationally representative two thousand three to two thousand seven american time use data
and we showed that working moms were about twice as likely or more than twice
as likely to get up for the night shift of caregiving for dependent children in the
household are working fathers were
and this was based on a very large sample of about twenty thousand americans in contemporary families here
what was interesting about this finding was that this was after taking account differences
between men and women
in their age in how many hours a week that they're working for pay in whether they had
a partner or a spouse to help with the family load
and whether they were kids around other people who might need care in the household
the way that we collected these data was to ask people to tell us everything they did for
a single twenty four-hour period and they were asked to provide when they started the
activity
and when they finished it so based on the information in these diaries days people who
had an infant in the household and we are dual career couples so they were they had a partner
and both partners worked should very large differences by gender and we found that about
one in three of these mothers in dual income couples were getting up to provide care compared to
only about one in ten of these fathers even among parents of infants who are sole
breadwinner in a couple twenty eight percent of women reported getting up at night to take
care of their child compared to just four percent of men who were the only earner in
the couple most people on the street that you ask would tell you know that's not surprising
to me at all, that most women are more likely to get up than men but what surprised us was that even among
people that had the same sets of career ambitions and that were working long hours and so on
we're still seeing these big gender differences that
we argue are part of social expectations taking on the lion share
of nighttime caregiving responsibilities if it's solely women who are doing this or for
the most part women who are doing this
this is important for two main reasons one is that sleep has been and increasing numbers
of studies in the medical literature and elsewhere linked very strongly to health and well-being
outcomes it has also been strongly linked to accidents either traffic accidents or
accidents at work the second reason why this is so important is because it could have
very important ramifications for people's careers and so if women are taking on the
burden of this during the childbearing years that could have unintended consequences for
people's career trajectories and as we know who most young people most middle-aged people
in the united states today regardless of gender are planning to have a serious paid work
career so that's kind of an measured motherhood penalty that we are finding in these data