The Sleep Gender Gap Is Real: Women Need More Sleep Than Men, Research Shows

Gender gaps exist in many areas of health, but the sleep gender gap is one of the least discussed. Research has identified that women, on average, require more sleep than men — not because of lifestyle choices, but because of how their brains function during the day. A physician recently brought this and four other important sleep facts into the spotlight.
The difference amounts to approximately 20 minutes per night. Researchers link this to multitasking — the cognitively intensive process of managing multiple tasks simultaneously. Women tend to engage in this kind of thinking more frequently, which places greater demands on the brain’s processing and memory consolidation systems. Sleep is when those systems do their most important restoration work, and more demand means more restoration time needed.
Understanding sleep onset time is also important. The physician identifies 10 to 20 minutes as the normal, healthy range for falling asleep. Falling asleep significantly faster can indicate sleep deprivation — the body is so exhausted that it skips the gradual wind-down process and crashes immediately. Consistently taking much longer to fall asleep is a hallmark of insomnia, a condition that affects sleep quality far beyond just the difficulty of falling asleep.
Dreams are one of sleep’s most mysterious features — and also one of its most reliably forgotten ones. About 95 percent of what we experience in our dreams is gone within minutes of waking, because dream content doesn’t get encoded into long-term memory. The advice is simple but requires immediacy: write down whatever you can remember the moment you wake up, before anything else competes for your attention.
The physician’s final two insights are both sobering and practical. Seventeen hours of continuous wakefulness produces cognitive impairment comparable to a 0.05 blood alcohol level — enough to affect driving, problem-solving, and complex judgment significantly. And with melatonin, the most effective dose is often the smallest: 0.5 mg mirrors the body’s own natural output and tends to work better than the higher-dose options commonly available in pharmacies and supplement stores.