French are Europe's biggest sleepers

PARIS (AFP) - French men and women spend more time sleeping than people polled in nine other European nations, staying in bed over eight hours per day, according to a survey on time use released this week by Eurostat, the EU statistics office.

But sleep patterns in France showed general gender equality -- eight hours 38 minutes for working women, eight hours 24 minutes for working men.

This was not the case for time spent on keeping the house clean.

French women spend 90 percent more time than French men on domestic work, the worst score for women in Europe, given that Swedish women for example spend 50 percent more time than men on domestic chores.

Swedish men and women appeared to sleep the least -- seven hours 52 minutes for men, eight hours five minutes for women -- of the people surveyed by Eurostat in Belgium, Germany, Estonia, France, Hungary, Slovenia, Finland, Sweden, Britain and Norway.

In all countries however the top leisure activity was watching TV, with people spending one third to one half of their free time watching television.

Hungary produced the continent's top couch potatoes, with 56 percent of women and 51 percent of men aged between 20 and 74 listing TV as their main free time activity.

In Hungary and Estonia, people spent around half their free time stuck in front of the box, with the figure at a third in Norway, Germany and Sweden.