Women rate their sleep quality lower than men, despite sleeping better. This is because they estimate their night-time awakenings more accurately than men, who tend to underestimate their frequency of wakefulness

>The researchers investigated differences in sleep between men and women, in terms of both objective measures and perceived sleep quality. 238 women and 238 men in Sweden, aged 29–85, recorded their sleep at home over one night using polysomnography, a method that measures brain activity, breathing and movements during sleep. The following morning, the participants rated their sleep quality.
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>The results, published in the journal Sleep Advances, reveal a clear pattern. On average, women rated their sleep quality as poorer than men, even though the objective measurements showed that they slept better. Among other things, the women had fewer awakenings per hour, a longer total sleep time, a higher sleep efficiency, and more deep sleep than the men.
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>Gender differences in memory
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>Women estimated the number of times they woke up during the night much more accurately than men, who underestimated how often they had been awake. On average, men spent less time awake each time they woke up. Men with short awakenings generally rated their sleep quality as good, whereas women generally rated their sleep quality as poorer, regardless of the duration of their awakenings.
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>When the researchers excluded men with short, barely noticeable awakenings from the analyses, the difference in self-reported sleep quality between the sexes disappeared.

>Differences increased with age
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>The study also shows that differences in sleep between men and women become more pronounced with age. At older ages, men experienced less deep sleep and more awakenings per hour, while women’s objective sleep deteriorated to a lesser extent. At the same time, women continued to report poorer sleep quality than men.
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>One limitation of the study is that sleep was measured over a single night and does not necessarily reflect long-term sleep patterns.

[Gender differences in objective and self-reported sleep | SLEEP Advances | Oxford Academic](https://academic.oup.com/sleepadvances/article/7/2/zpag048/8663014)

“Men’s standards are too low. Women are pickier.”

Big issue for those of us with sleep apnea. Even with my CPAP machine I’m waking four or five times a night. The machine tells me how long it was on each night, but I have difficulty judging how long it was after I put the machine on until I actually fell asleep. As a consequence I try for 9 hours of CPAP usage a night to get 8 hours of sleep, but frankly that’s a guess. (I’m male FWIW.)

>It’s a paradox, but we have found a possible explanation for why sleep quality is perceived so differently by men and women

This is really a common topic? The perception in sleep quality between men and women? Something so biologically essential is going to be incredibly discretionary based on the individual, including their perception. Odd study

Women wear smartwatches more than men, so this tracks

Wait, why are we comparing the “objective” quality of sleep of men vs women? We already know that women actually need more sleep than men to feel properly rested. So measuring sleep in men and women in an “objective” way, ie assuming both sexes should have THE SAME amount of deep sleep/awakenings/REM/whatever is gonna be wrong.

So isn’t this study, once again, taking the “objectively good” quality of sleep (aka “what is good enough for a man”) and then comparing women’s Q of sleep to that, just to then arrive at the predictable conclusion of “aha! Their sleep is fine, they just complain about it more!”?

What awakenings? Am I supposed to awake more than once?