Who said men cant multitask

German researchers tested the speed and accuracy of 48 women and 48 men as they performed two types of multitasking: shifting their attention among multiple tasks and performing two tasks simultaneously. In the first scenario, both men and women made significantly more errors when they volleyed among tasks than when they focused on one task and completed it before moving on.

Trying to do two tasks simultaneously yielded even worse performance: Both groups were more than twice as likely to make a mistake while performing two tasks at once than they were when switching between tasks. Lead study author Patricia Hirsch, a professor of psychology at RWTH Aachen University in Germany, said that while multitasking can be assessed in different ways, the new research provides solid evidence suggesting one sex does not have a leg-up in task-switching or when performing tasks simultaneously.

According to Earl K. Miller, a professor of neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the stereotype surrounding women could be due to perception based on the need to do multiple things at once. The more experienced people are at driving, the more comfortable they will likely feel performing a secondary task at the same time, such as talking on the phone. They are required to prepare a room for a meeting, that is, they have to place objects such as the chairs, pencils, and drinks in the right location, while at the same time dealing with distractors such as a missing chair and a phone call, and to remember actions to be carried out in the future e.

This computerized simulation was originally created to allow for placing all the participants in the exact same conditions which permits to easily compare their performance and to avoid variables that may affect it e. Such tasks also allow for measuring many variables at the same time. Finally, the task was designed to place participants in an unfamiliar situation, that is, in a situation where most people do not have any previous experience that would help them in carrying out the task.

Our idea with the present study was simple yet rare in the scientific literature: to use a validated task to assess whether there are gender differences in multitasking abilities in an everyday scenario in the general population.

In order to do so, we recruited 66 females and 82 males aged between 18 and 60 years old and we asked them to carry out the CMPT. Thereafter, we compared the performance of both groups on several variables from the CMPT: overall accuracy of task completion e. We found no differences between men and women in terms of serial multitasking abilities. We cannot exclude the possibility that there are no sex differences in serial multitasking abilities, but if they do exist, such differences are likely to be very small.

There is a need for other studies that replicate these findings, or that investigate concurrent multitasking. But we think it is fair to conclude that the evidence for the stereotype that women are better multitaskers is, so far, fairly weak. You have 1 free article s left this month. Completing all these assignments in eight minutes was impossible - so it forced men and women to prioritise, organise their time, and keep calm under pressure.

In the key search task in particular, women displayed a clear performance advantage over men, says co-author Prof Keith Laws, of the University of Hertfordshire. That's a highly productive strategy for finding a lost object. The reason, he observed, was that women were more organised under pressure. Altogether, they conclude that women "have an advantage over men" in multitasking, at least in certain situations.

They regale me with stories about how the greatest pilots in the RAF are men and they have to deal with lots of different incoming information all the time.

We'd never claim that all men can't multitask, or that only women can. Psychologist Dr Dongning Ren of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said the study was a useful addition to the scientific debate.

It may depend on the nature of the tasks - sequential or simultaneous. In a world where people increasingly have to multitask, we need to help individuals adapt their roles to their abilities, said Prof Laws. Instead, employers should consider assessing individuals' ability in multitasking, as some firms already do.

If women really are better than men, the obvious question is why? It could be that what Dr Stoet and Prof Laws observed is a learning effect - where people become expert multitaskers by practice. But there are plenty of evolutionary theories too - such as the hunter-gatherer hypothesis. This invokes a rather traditional image of women at home, cooking and tending to the infants, with men out doing so-called "linear" tasks such as chasing and killing prey.

And interestingly - compared to our closest relatives, the apes, we are all terrible at multitasking - men and women alike.