Why women’s extra effort to stay sociable when tired is all in vain

A NASA study has found that we routinely tend to underestimate how much fatigue women are experiencing, but overestimate tiredness in men.

Morgan Stosic and her ­colleagues found that onlookers consistently underestimated how much discomfort the female volunteers were experiencing. Picture: Getty Images

NASA appears to have identified a new gender gap, with a study suggesting that we routinely underestimate how tired women are feeling.

The opposite seemed to be true for men: in an experiment, observers tended to think that they were more fatigued than they really were.

The results could be explained by differences in how the sexes behave in company, with researchers for the US space agency finding that women who felt drained still tended to make an effort to be sociable - something that men were much less likely to do.

The study began as an effort to keep tabs on the energy levels of astronauts. NASA has long been interested in tiredness, which is estimated to have been a factor in about half of the accidents and errors recorded in space and aviation.

Dr Morgan Stosic, a research psychologist at Nasa’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas, wanted to know if the body language of space crews could be monitored to detect fatigue.

Her team asked a set of participants to have five-minute conversations with strangers, which were recorded. Next the researchers asked the participants to describe how much fatigue they had been experiencing.

Another set of 71 volunteers were asked to watch the videos, with the volume turned off, and to rate the fatigue levels of the participants. This was done on a scale of zero (not at all tired) to ten (as exhausted as it is possible to be).

“Generally, perceivers were underestimating how much fatigue women themselves had reported but they were overestimating how much fatigue men had reported,” said Stosic. Women had their fatigue underestimated by about 1.3 points, while men had their fatigue overestimated by 0.9 points, on average.

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore, right, and Suni Williams. The study began as an effort to keep tabs on the energy levels of astronauts. Picture: AFP

According to Stosic, the results were not a surprise. They align with a previous study by her team, where men and women volunteers had a tourniquet applied to the upper arm and were asked to do handgrip exercises.

Scientists do this to induce pain in a laboratory setting. Stosic and her colleagues found that onlookers consistently underestimated how much discomfort the female volunteers were experiencing, and overestimated how much pain the men were in.

Other studies hint at widespread, but possibly misplaced, assumptions that men are the more stoic sex. Female patients tend to wait longer, for instance, for pain medications than men. They are also more likely to be recommended psychological treatments such as antidepressants for chronic pain, whereas men are more likely to be prescribed analgesic pain-killers or have laboratory tests requested for possible physical problems.

In the new experiment, observers consistently rated women as less fatigued than men, even though women reported higher levels of fatigue on average.

The researchers also found that women, on average, were more expressive and attentive while they were having their conversations with strangers. This included making more eye contact.

This expressiveness was not a good indicator of how tired participants of either sex actually felt. Nevertheless, observers seemed to pick up on these gestures. “Perceivers were using those behaviours as a cue to think that women were less fatigued,” Stosic said. The findings have been published in the journal Sex Roles.

The Times