The stereotype goes, women are better at multitasking than men. This idea has persisted despite evidence showing just how bad ALL humans are at multitasking.
A group of German researchers put this myth to bed.
As reported in Plos One, a study investigating gender differences in multitasking showed that there was no difference between the results of men and women. They did once again could confirm that men and women’s performances suffer when asked to do multiple things at once. So its a human thing, not a man thing.
Of the 96 participants, half of them were men and the other half were women. The researchers used different methods of measurement for both reaction time and accuracy in the tasks, with them ending up with 10 total measures.
The idea that women are somehow better at multitasking is thought to be influenced by the fact that some women do a lot more jobs than men.
The authors wrote:
“Multitasking resulted in substantial performance costs across all experimental conditions without a single significant gender difference in any of these 10 measures. Thus, our results do not confirm the widespread stereotype that women are better at multitasking than men at least in the popular sequential and concurrent multitasking settings used in the present study.”
