We’ve all heard the words ‘women are better at multitasking’, and while it might be anecdotally true for you, science says it’s not necessarily so.
Whether you can do the ironing, watch TV, scroll Instagram, and have an existential crisis, the idea that women are better at multitasking is just a myth, say researchers at the University of Bergen, Norway.
In a blog for the Harvard Business Review, researchers said there is no real difference between men and women when it comes to doing several things at once.
They used a single, validated task to assess whether there were gender differences in the general population. They found that men and women are actually equally bad at multitasking.
One of the reasons why studies and research has found discrepancies in gender domination of multitasking is because of different definitions of the word being used.
Different researchers consider multitasking to mean different things which has an effect on the results discovered. To clarify their study, they used University College London (UCL) professor Paul Burgess’ definition of concurrent multitasking.
This means doing two or more activities at the same time (talking on the phone while driving) and serial multitasking, in which you switch rapidly between tasks (preparing your next meeting and answering an email, being interrupted by a colleague, checking Twitter). ‘It’s this latter type of multitasking that most of us do most often, and this type of multitasking we wanted to test,’ said the authors.
Participants were asked to prepare an office meeting (by placing chairs, pencils, and drinks in the right location) while being exposed to different distracting stimuli – including a phone call with details to be remembered later.
Several factors were tested such as accuracy, total time taken, total distance covered, ticking all the tasks and whether they handled the call in a timely manner.
They concluded that there were ‘no differences between men and women in terms of serial multitasking abilities’. ‘It is fair to conclude that the evidence for the stereotype that women are better multitaskers is, so far, fairly weak,’ they said.