Scientists explain why women's fatigue is overlooked more often than men's

Scientists have explained why people pay much less attention to tired women but always acknowledge tired men. This study was conducted by NASA researchers.

According to its results, people regularly underestimate the degree of fatigue in women, while men's is significantly overestimated. Scientists say this may be due to the fact that women make more effort to appear sociable even when they are exhausted. And men may appear more tired because they are less attentive and expressive in conversation, MailOnline writes.

According to the researchers, understanding these differences is vital when it comes to observing astronauts in space. It is believed that the majority of all space and aviation accidents are caused by fatigue, which means that accurately assessing how tired someone is can save lives.

Combating fatigue is an ongoing challenge for space agencies such as NASA, which need crews to perform at their best. Therefore, the goal of this research was to develop a method for assessing fatigue that would be based solely on non-verbal cues such as body language.

Volunteers were asked to talk to a stranger for five minutes and then rate the level of fatigue they felt at that time. Their fatigue was measured on a scale from zero, meaning they were not tired at all, to 10, meaning they were as exhausted as they could be. A separate group of 71 participants then watched the videos of these conversations with the sound off and rated how tired they thought each speaker was at the time.

The study's author, Dr Morgan Stosic of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, found no association between nonverbal cues and self-rated fatigue, but she did find significant differences between the sexes, according to the study published on ResearchGate.

Despite the fact that women reported higher fatigue, observers underestimated the degree of women's tiredness by an average of 1.3 points. Meanwhile, men's fatigue was rated about 0.9 points higher than the men reported themselves.

By tracking the participants' body language, the researchers found that women tended to behave in ways that made them appear more attentive, such as making eye contact. While this was not a direct indicator of how tired the participant actually was, observers could mistake these gestures for genuine signs of alertness.

These findings are consistent with a growing body of research that suggests that women's discomfort is paid much less attention to.

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