How time devoted to sleep differs by social milieu and number of children

Author: Capucine Rauch

How much time do we devote to sleep? Who sleeps the most? While sleep is a physiological need that varies with age and health status, it is not determined by biological factors alone. Using three Time Use Surveys from France, Capucine Rauch shows how the time set aside for sleep is socially structured: it is gendered, it varies according to the demands of both family life and work, and it differs by occupational category. The article also analyses the main trends observed between the mid-1980s and the end of the 2000.

Over 25 years, the time devoted to sleep remained stable, except among older adults, whose sleep time decreased. Its place in daily routines did not remain fixed, however. Bedtimes moved progressively later, partly due to the growing popularity of evening TV programmes that kept viewers up for longer. Thus, in 2009, it was not until midnight that three-quarters of the population were in bed, a share reached at 23.30 in 1998 and at 23.15 in 1985.

Time devoted to sleep is linked to gender and work. For women, the presence of children reduced their sleep time more than for men. Mothers’ loss of sleep time linked to the presence of children under 2 years old was double that of fathers.

Working decreases sleep time, but work’s effect was not the same for all occupational categories. People in higher-level occupations had the shortest sleep time (around 8 hours), some 20–30 minutes less than the other occupational categories, although this duration varied between working and non-working days. It is among manual workers that the difference in sleep time between working and non-working days was largest.

After retirement, the sleep patterns acquired during working life remained unchanged. Retirees formerly in higher-level or intermediate occupations slept less than farmers and manual workers.

The findings described in this article are drawn from a PhD thesis prepared at INED and at the Sciences Po School of Research entitled Le sommeil, une variable d’ajustement ? Différences sociales et genrées au cours du cycle de vie (Sleep, an adjustment variable? Social and gendered differences over the life cycle), defended on 2 December 2022 http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12204/AYUu_A1dLg0aT10RuaV3