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.

疲劳是最常见的健康问题之一，但当对他人疲劳的看法被性别偏见扭曲时，评估疲劳可能很困难。这项研究是第一个检查男性和女性疲劳感知中是否存在这种偏差的研究。在两项研究 （总 N = 201） 中，感知者在社交互动中观看男性和女性目标的无声视频剪辑，并被要求估计每个目标的疲劳度。虽然女性报告的疲劳程度高于男性，但在这两项研究中，感知者认为女性的疲劳程度明显低于男性。研究 2 的结果进一步表明，与她们自己的疲劳自我报告相比，女性的疲劳程度被显著低估，而男性的疲劳程度与她们自己的自我报告相比被显著高估。为了探索目标疲劳评分的任何差异是否是由于目标自身的行为造成的，我们还为每个目标编码了可能与疲劳相关的各种非语言线索。对这些非语言线索的检查并未发现与男性或女性目标的自我报告疲劳有任何显着关系。然而，非语言表达/注意力目标越多，他们被感知者判断为疲劳的可能性就越小，女性目标比男性目标表现出更多的表达力/注意力，这解释了为什么女性的疲劳比男性更容易被低估的一些差异。目前的工作首次记录了在感知他人疲劳时存在着强烈的性别偏见，并指出了有助于在实践中减轻这些偏见的干预措施。