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In a TikTok video that has racked up 1.4 million likes , men are handed scissors and a sheet of paper and asked to cut out a Christmas tree while describing their favorite memory with their partner. The men start telling a story, but most trail off as they concentrate on the cutting. In another clip, a woman calmly juggles four different chores while her husband struggles to put on socks and hold a conversation simultaneously.
These videos are designed to make you laugh. But they also reflect and reinforce the idea that women are better multitaskers than men. Studies putting this stereotype to the test have yielded very mixed results. Yet the idea that there is a gender difference in the ability to multitask remains lodged in the public mind. Researchers think there are various reasons why the stereotype persists.
Multitasking under the microscope
Science is clear on one thing: multitasking is incredibly difficult. The human brain has evolved to single-task. โWe can do things at the same time when they are highly automatized, but other than that, humans in general struggle,โ said Marco Hirnstein , professor in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Bergen, Norway. (I was relieved to hear that as I struggled to listen, take notes, and think of my next question all at once during our Zoom call.)
But when it comes to whether women are better multitaskers than men, scientists donโt seem to agree. Early studies seemed to back the stereotype. In 2013 , researchers in the U.K. found that everyone slowed down when multitasking โ but men slowed down significantly more. Two years later, a Russian team reported that men used more parts of their brains to multitask and still took longer, suggesting that multitasking requires more effort in men.
Then the picture got complicated. A 2017 study concluded that men and women multitask equally well, even if their brains may go about it differently. In 2018 , when volunteers were given a realistic multitasking challenge โ preparing a room for a meeting while fielding distractions โ there was no difference between men and women on every measure the researchers tracked: accuracy, time, distance walked, remembering to do the right thing at the right moment, and dealing with distractions. A 2019 study found that multitasking led to a similar loss of speed and accuracy for both men and women.
Then a 2021 study flipped the script entirely, finding that men handled multitasking better than women, which the researchers chalked up to faster mental processing speed in men.
โThe findings are incredibly inconsistent,โ said Hirnstein . โI would say itโs probably even more inconsistent than you normally get in psychological research.โ
Making sense of the research
Tilo Strobach , a professor in general psychology at MSH Medical School Hamburg, Germany, suspects that the mixed findings are due to differences in study design. โMy feeling is that this mix is because of the different types of multitasking situations that were used across the studies,โ he said.
Multitasking means doing two or more things simultaneously or in rapid succession. So talking while driving counts, but so does cooking, as it involves a quick sequence of steps. Different studies use different multitasking setups, with some task combinations overlapping in time and others being more sequential, explained Strobach. This variation in setups, he argues, helps explain why the findings are so mixed.
Gender differences in specific tasks also play a role. Hirnsteinโs own research has shown that women tend to be better at finding and remembering words than men . Men are better at imagining what a complex 3D cube would look like if you were to rotate it . If you choose tasks for a multitasking experiment that already favor men or women, โthen youโre probably just going to find the same difference that you observe in the single task,โ Hirnstein said.
A good example of this is a 2013 study that found men were better at multitasking than women. The researchers traced this difference in multitasking outcomes to menโs superior spatial ability. Interestingly, when women were in the menstrual phase of their cycle โ a time when womenโs spatial skills are at their highest โ the multitasking gap disappeared.
A self-fulfilling prophecy or a kernel of truth?
Strobach is certain that โthereโs no difference between men and women at allโ when it comes to multitasking ability.
But the stereotype can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, he said. If men expect to do worse than women, that expectation can sap their motivation and effort, increase their anxiety, and drag down their performance โ making the stereotype look true even when no real difference in multitasking ability exists.
Hirnstein takes a slightly different view. He agrees that stereotypes affect performance, but believes that performance informs stereotypes too. People watch how others perform and generalize from that. The resulting stereotype is exaggerated and overly generalized, he said, โbut there is this kernel of truth.โ
Currently, โwe donโt have proof that there is a sex difference in multitasking because the data is not consistent enough,โ Hirnstein said. But he suspects there is one: โIf you measure it right, you probably will find something.โ
A specific behavior might drive the stereotype
Andrรฉ and Diana Szameitat, a husband-and-wife research team at Brunel University of London, have offered a different explanation for why the stereotype persists. Andrรฉ Szameitat is deputy director of the universityโs Centre for Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience; Diana Szameitat is an honorary lecturer in its psychology department.
In a study published earlier this year in Psychological Research , the Szameitats asked 41 men and 37 women to juggle five tasks at once in a setup that closely resembled real life. At one table, participants followed a recipe with pretend ingredients. When a kitchen timer rang, they broke off and dashed to a second table for two quick tasks โ a phone-number search and a visual search โ then returned to cooking. All the while, they watched a slideshow of words, jotting down any on a red background, a task that mimics the act of keeping an eye on a toddler. And every 20 seconds, a speaker played a recorded question they had to answer aloud, such as: โWould you rather lose all your money and valuables, or every photo youโve ever taken, and why?โ
Across the cooking, searching, and monitoring tasks, men and women performed equally well. However, a difference emerged in the talking task. Men failed to answer the questions more than twice as often as women.
When a group of neutral observers, unaware of what the researchers were testing, watched short films of the participants at work, they rated the female multitaskers as being more in control of the task, performing better, and being less stressed than the male multitaskers. Their judgment was highly influenced by the participantsโ performance on the conversation task.
Andrรฉ Szameitat said the study showed two things. First, men and women differ in how well they multitask when one of the tasks is talking. Second, other people see this difference and use it to judge how well someone multitasks. โWe suggest that this pattern can explain why the stereotype that women are better at multitasking than men may have developed,โ he said. But he warned that the results only show a correlation for now, and more work is needed to prove that menโs reticence while multitasking is what drives the stereotype.
For now, it remains unclear whether men strategically drop the conversation to focus, or because they are unable to keep talking while doing something mentally demanding. โIt could be a conscious decision,โ Hirnstein said. โIt could also be that they had so much going on at the same time that something had to give, and the first thing to go was this verbal task.โ
If a male partner starts ignoring you mid-conversation while heโs busy with something else (just like the men in those TikTok videos), โone shouldnโt get angry,โ Szameitat said. The study suggests this is a common pattern, not rudeness.
But there are settings where a manโs reduced talkativeness could be a serious issue. โThere are highly critical situations where communication is essential, for example between pilot and co-pilot or control tower,โ Szameitat said. Yet it is not yet known whether the findings would carry over into a high-stress event such as an aviation emergency, or whether the difference might disappear under that kind of pressure. This is a question for future research, Szameitat said. โBecause these are early findings, it is important not to overstretch such implications and avoid headlines like โMen canโt fly planesโ or alike.โ
This article The โwomen are better multitaskersโ stereotype is messier than you think is featured on Big Think .
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