Is the 'women better than men at multi-tasking' theory true?

A paper has appeared in the BMC Psychology journal which tried to settle the age-old argument of whether women are better than men at multi-tasking. Written by researchers from the Universities of Glasgow, Leeds and Hertfordshire, the study focused on the widely-held belief that women performed better than men when undertaking several tasks at once.

Comprising of two experiments, 120 men and 120 women were given a computer based test: when they were only given one task at a time, both men and women performed the same. However, when they had to quickly switch between two different tasks both sexes slowed down as they concentrated more, but there was a small but noticeable difference as women performed slightly better. The researchers believe that this difference – when replicated many times over a day – meant that women were much more able to handle multiple tasks at the same times than men.

The second experiment, performed using a different group of 47 men and 47 women, was designed to more clearly resemble a ‘real life’ problem: they were given 8 minutes in which to do some simple maths, answer a telephone call, find a restaurant on a map and decide how they would go about searching for a key which had been lost in a field. The time limit was too short for them to finish all the tasks, so prioritisation played an important part as well as being organised and keeping calm.

This time there was no discernible difference between men and women as to how well they performed in the tasks, expect the test where they had to find a lost key: women were much better at thinking of how they would go about this and by demonstrating their chosen ‘route’ around the field on a piece of paper, they showed a much more organised and methodical way of going about it, whereas the men’s attempt seemed much more haphazard.

The researchers emphasise that due to the lack of other studies in this area the results shouldn’t be generalised across the whole population but taken in isolation until other studies are done, which they strongly recommend.


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