From the Times’s Motherlode blog:

In the “Things You Already Knew But It’s Nice to Have Them Confirmed So You Know You Aren’t Imagining Things” department, the Washington Post ran news this week of a new research study that concluded that “Women are more likely than men to give up sleep to care for children.”

Specifically, a study by researchers at the University of Michigan, to be published in the upcoming journal Social Forces (and not yet available online), finds that women are nearly three times as likely to wake from sleep to care for others — fearful children, sick spouse, whining puppy. And once awake, women stay up for 44 minutes, while men are back in bed after 30 minutes.

Gotta admit, I’m kinda in this category. I get up in the middle of the night to feed Ellie, but I do it quicker than Tomoko, spending less time fussing over the baby before putting her back in the crib, and—most important—she absolutely has to wake me up or I will sleep through the whole damn thing.

Willful ignorance on my part, or am I just an evil genius? You decide.