Gender Bias in the Perception of Others’ Fatigue: Women Report More Fatigue Than Men But Have Their Fatigue Underestimated by Others

Fatigue is one of the most common health complaints, yet assessing it can be difficult when perceptions of others’ fatigue are distorted by gender bias. This research is the first to examine whether such a bias is present in the perception of men’s and women’s fatigue. Across two studies (total N = 201), perceivers viewed silent videoclips of men and women targets in a social interaction and were asked to estimate each targets’ fatigue. While women reported more fatigue than men, across both studies perceivers rated women as significantly less fatigued than men. Results from Study 2 further suggested that women’s fatigue was significantly underestimated in comparison to their own self-reports of fatigue while men’s fatigue was significantly overestimated in comparison to their own self-reports. To explore whether any differences in ratings of targets’ fatigue were due to targets’ own behavior, we also coded each target for various nonverbal cues that could be associated with fatigue. An examination of these nonverbal cues did not reveal any significant relationships with self-reported fatigue for either men or women targets. However, the more nonverbally expressive/attentive targets were, the less likely they were to be judged as fatigued by perceivers and women targets displayed more expressiveness/attentiveness than men targets, explaining some of the variance in why women’s fatigue was underestimated more than men’s. The current work is the first to document the robust existence of gender bias in the perception of others’ fatigue and points towards interventions to help mitigate these biases in practice.