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The idea that women are naturally better multitaskers than men has become a cultural cliché, but a new study suggests that belief may not reflect a broad difference in multitasking ability after all.
Researchers who set out to test whether men and women perform differently when managing several tasks at once found little evidence of an overall advantage for either sex. Instead, they identified a much more specific difference: men were more likely to disengage from conversation while multitasking.
The findings, published in Psychological Research, come as multitasking has become an increasingly common feature of daily life, whether people are balancing work responsibilities, household chores, driving or social interactions.
Competing Demands
Previous research examining sex differences in multitasking has produced mixed results, with studies generally finding only small and inconsistent differences. Seeking a clearer answer, researchers André and Diana Szameitat designed an experiment intended to reflect the kinds of competing demands people face outside the laboratory.
Rather than relying on a single test, participants were asked to handle five tasks simultaneously. The setup included following a recipe in a kitchen environment, searching for phone numbers, completing a number-letter matching exercise, monitoring words displayed in a slideshow and answering a question every 20 seconds as part of an ongoing conversation.
The study involved 41 men and 37 women.
If women possessed a general multitasking advantage, researchers might have expected that to emerge across the wider range of activities. Instead, performance was largely comparable.
Men and women showed similar results across the different tasks, with only one clear exception. Men ignored the conversational task more than twice as often as women while carrying out the multitasking exercise.
Importantly, the researchers found no evidence that men were less capable of responding when they chose to engage. The quality and speed of their answers were similar to those of women. The difference lay in how often they responded rather than how well they did so.
Narrower Than Assumed
The finding led the researchers to conclude that the commonly cited gap between men and women in multitasking may be narrower than widely assumed.
“Taken together, our data confirm that there are no substantial sex differences in cognitive visual-manual tasks, but that significant sex differences do exist in the ability to hold a conversation while multitasking”, André Szameitat said.
The researchers also wanted to know whether that specific behavioral difference affected how multitaskers were perceived by others.
To explore that question, they conducted a second study involving 160 observers who watched recordings of participants completing the tasks. The observers were not given any prior information about the experiment and were simply asked to evaluate the participants’ performance.
A Striking Pattern
Their judgements revealed a striking pattern.
Compared with female participants, male multitaskers were viewed as being less in control of the task, performing worse, using less effort, being less alert, less happy and enjoying the task less.
Those perceptions emerged even though the study found similar performance between men and women across the majority of the multitasking measures.
The researchers suggest that the difference in conversational engagement may help explain why the stereotype that women are better multitaskers has persisted despite limited evidence for a broad advantage.
One possible explanation, they note, is that women may, on average, engage more in communicative behaviour in social situations. However, the authors stress that this idea was not directly tested in the study and should be interpreted cautiously.
In Everyday Life
According to the researchers, the ability to maintain a conversation while carrying out other activities may be particularly noticeable in everyday life, making it more likely to shape people’s impressions of multitasking ability than other, less visible aspects of performance.
As Szameitat put it, conversational multitasking is, “an ability highly salient in everyday life and, thus, could explain the development of the widespread public stereotype that women are better at multitasking than men”.
While multitasking is increasingly required at work and in everyday life, experts believe it may not even be a skill, but rather a “symptom.”
Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey, subtraction activist, Forbes Leadership Senior Contributor, and creator of the Lead in 3D framework, told Newsweek that nobody multitasks because they’re actually good at (or enjoy) it, they multitask because they’ve said yes to more than any one person can do sequentially.
“We keep asking the capacity question—who can do more at once?—when the real question is about curation: why is all of this on your plate to begin with?”
Another misconception according to Dewey is that multitasking is something you can get better at.
“Getting better at multitasking is like getting better at bailing water. At some point, you have to ask about the hole in the boat,” she said.
Dewey also believes that being called a great multitasker is actually not a compliment.
“In most workplaces, it’s a workload transfer dressed up as praise. When we celebrate someone (often a woman) for handling so much, we’re really celebrating our ability to keep handing her more,” she added.
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