At the World Sleep Congress 2025 in Singapore, new research has shed light on how women’s sleep changes with age, lifestyle, and culture.

Using data from thousands of women wearing Samsung smartwatches across multiple countries, the study offers a fresh perspective on the key factors shaping women’s sleep patterns worldwide.

Key Findings: Age, Activity, and the Weekend Effect

Sleep data, taken from 192,500 women aged 20 to 65, each with at least seven nights of recordings, spans the US, South Korea, Germany, France, and the UK.

It reveals that sleep duration steadily decreases as women age. For example, women aged 60–65 clocked in around 17 minutes less sleep than those aged 20–24, an age-related trend observed in nearly every country studied. Yet, despite the gradual loss of nightly minutes, women worldwide seem to have a universal solution: the weekend.

Data shows that on Friday and Saturday nights, women enjoy longer sleep periods of about 24 minutes more per night compared to weeknights, suggesting a global pattern of catching up on rest during the weekend.

Interestingly, the impact of physical activity on sleep is surprisingly slight. Whether highly active or less so, women’s total sleep times differs by less than three minutes, and time spent awake after falling asleep varies by less than a minute. This challenges the common assumption that exercise alone is a major driver of better sleep.

Culture Makes the Difference: Country Trumps Habits in Women’s Sleep

While personal habits like age and activity played a minor role, the study highlights that a woman’s country, her cultural and lifestyle context, has measurable effects on how women sleeps. Nowhere is this more evident than in South Korea, where both sleep duration and age-related increases in wakefulness after sleep are more pronounced than in other countries.

These findings suggest that broader societal and cultural differences can shape sleep more powerfully than individual routines.

The Power of Wearable Tech in Sleep Science

By leveraging wearable technology, researchers are able to capture real-world sleep patterns over seven nights, offering new insights into global trends. And Samsung Executives encouraged scientists to tap into their treasure trove of sleep data from their wearables to provide more valuable health insights globally. In the case of this study, by advancing sleep research the door opens for tailored interventions to help women everywhere sleep better.

World Sleep Congress 2025 Insights At A Glance

New research presented at the World Sleep Conference revealed surprising trends about how women sleep across the globe:

• Age matters: Women sleep less as they get older. Those aged 60–65 averaged 17 minutes less per night than women in their early 20s.
• The weekend effect: Across all countries, women caught up on rest with an extra 24 minutes of sleep on Friday and Saturday nights.
• Activity isn’t everything: Surprisingly, high versus low physical activity levels only changed women’s sleep by three minutes or less.
• Culture counts most: Where women live has the biggest impact. In South Korea, for instance, shorter sleep and more frequent wake-ups were more pronounced than in other countries.

These insights were presented during the oral abstract session “Tracking Sleep: Tools, Trends, and Tailored Interventions” on the first day of the World Sleep Congress in Singapore.

Why Women’s Sleep Research Matters

For decades, women have been underrepresented in medical studies and sleep research has been no exception. Until the early 1990s, women of childbearing age were often excluded from clinical trials altogether. Instead, most health guidelines were designed around male biology. This gap has had lasting consequences, leaving doctors and researchers with an incomplete picture of women’s health.

Cardiovascular disease is one of the clearest examples: women often present with very different symptoms of a heart attack than men, but diagnostic standards were built on male patterns. Similarly, studies on pain management historically focused on men, even though women are more likely to suffer from chronic pain conditions such as migraines, fibromyalgia, and endometriosis.

The same story has played out in sleep science. Large-scale research has traditionally centred on men, overlooking the ways hormonal cycles, life stages, and cultural pressures uniquely shape women’s rest. That’s what makes the new smartwatch study so significant. By capturing data from thousands of women across the globe, it delivers new insights into how women sleep. It also highlights the urgent need for more gender-specific research across all areas of health.

Note From Editor: I attended the World Sleep Congress 2025 in Singapore with a small group of journalists as a guest of Samsung Australia. This is the first of my reports from the conference.

AI Disclaimer: This article was written with the help of accurate fact-checked research conducted with AI. As a writer, I am happy to have more time to cover more stories as well as the ability to ideate versus research and I assure you, these thoughts and conclusion belong to me.