If women want to lean in to work, they may first want to lie down for a good night’s rest, an American university said last week
A study led by Washington State University indicated that sleep quality impacted women’s mood and changed how they felt about advancing in their careers, the institution said in a press release. However, sleep quality did not impact men’s aspirations, it added.
The researchers discovered this finding in a two-week-long survey study of 135 workers in the United States.
“When women are getting a good night’s sleep and their mood is boosted, they are more likely to be oriented in their daily intentions toward achieving status and responsibility at work,” said lead author Leah Sheppard. “If their sleep is poor and reduces their positive mood, then we saw that they were less oriented toward those goals.”
For the study, Sheppard and co-authors Julie Kmec and Teng Iat Loi surveyed full-time employees twice a day for two consecutive work weeks for a total of more than 2,200 observations.
Both men and women reported good and bad sleep quality over the course of the study, notably with no gender difference in reported sleep quality. However, women more often reported lowered intentions to pursue more status at work on days following a night of poor sleep.
The researchers suspect the reason sleep’s impact on mood affects women’s aspirations and not men’s may have to do with gender differences in emotion regulation as well as societal expectations – or some combination of these forces.
Neuroscience research has shown that women tend to experience greater emotional re-activity and less emotion regulation than men, and this can be reinforced by cultural stereotypes of women as more emotional.
At the same time, stereotypes of men as being more ambitious than women likely add more pressure for them to scale the corporate ladder, so perhaps poor sleep quality would be less likely to deter men from their work aspirations.
The findings are in the Sex Roles journal.
