Q: I’ve heard that women need several hours more sleep per night than men do. Is this true?
If you browse social media for information on healthy sleep habits, you may stumble across one of the many posts arguing that women require more sleep than men — “dramatically more sleep,” some even claim. The reasons given vary, including hormonal differences and the notion that women have faster-working brains than men do.
As it turns out, we don’t have any legitimate research that suggests these claims are true.
“There is no evidence that there is a fundamental biological reason women need more sleep,” said Dr. Suzanne Bertisch, a physician specializing in sleep disorders at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
On average, women do seem to spend several more minutes in bed every night than men do, but that doesn’t mean they require more sleep, she said.
Men and Women Sleep Differently
Only a handful of studies have evaluated differences in sleep duration among men and women. In a landmark study from 2013, researchers analyzed survey data from more than 56,000 adults in the United States. When participants were asked how they spent their time over a recent 24-hour period, women reported devoting an average of 11 minutes more to sleep the previous night than men did.
This didn’t necessarily mean that the women actually slept for 11 minutes more than men, however. As the study explained, the time participants reported also included the minutes they spent attempting to sleep — and women are far more likely than men to experience insomnia, said Rebecca Robbins, a sleep scientist and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. The 2013 study also found that women were nearly five times as likely as men to report sleep interruptions as a result of caregiving, usually for a child.
Research suggests that women experience lower quality sleep, on average, than men do — whether they’re caregivers or not. In a 2023 online survey of more than 2,000 adults from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, for instance, researchers found that women were nearly twice as likely as men to say they rarely or never wake up feeling well rested.