Joan Costa-Font and Sarah Flèche were tired. Like, really tired.
Both were new parents struggling to keep up their work productivity on little to no sleep each night. So the pair, based in the UK, decided to figure out just how much their sleepless nights were affecting their work.
And they were the perfect people to do so: Costa-Font is a health economist, Flèche a labour economist. Combined, they were able to run a scientific experiment that basically says, ‘I told you so’ to anyone doubting a parent’s exhaustion.
Their goal was to quantify the ‘productivity drop’ that occurs in the early months of parenthood where sleep is but a distant memory. According to the pair, as little as one hour sleep loss per night can dramatically influence how long and how hard you can work in your chosen career, and eventually have a significant effect on your income.
“A one-hour reduction in sleep duration significantly decreases labour force participation, the number of hours worked and household income,” they write in the study.
“We argue that sleep is a major determinant of employment outcomes that needs more attention in designing economic models of time allocation and employment policies.”
(That’s the sound of a thousand mums cheering, by the way.)
So, they looked at a massive set of data called the ALSPAC data, which has followed more than 14,000 families from child birth to age 25 in the UK. This data provided massive reams of information about the parents’ characteristics, family background, parental and child sleep quality, employment, working-time decisions, income and job satisfaction.