Follow our live coverage for the latest news on the coronavirus pandemic. Multitasking has traditionally been perceived as a woman's domain. A woman, particularly one with children, will routinely be juggling a job and running a household — in itself a frantic mix of kids' lunch boxes, housework, and organising appointments and social arrangements. But a new study, published today in PLOS One , shows women are actually no better at multitasking than men.
The study tested whether women were better at switching between tasks and juggling multiple tasks at the same time. The results showed women's brains are no more efficient at either of these activities than men's.
Using robust data to challenge these sorts of myths is important, especially given women continue to be bombarded with work, family and household tasks. Multitasking is the act of performing several independent tasks within a short time.
It requires rapidly and frequently switching attention from one task to another, increasing the cognitive demand, compared to completing single tasks in sequence. This study builds on an existing body of research showing human brains cannot manage multiple activities at once.
Particularly when two tasks are similar, they compete to use the same part of the brain, which makes multitasking very difficult. But human brains are good at switching between activities quickly, which makes people feel like they're multitasking.
The brain, however, is working on one project at a time. In this new study, German researchers compared the abilities of 48 men and 48 women in how well they identified letters and numbers. In some experiments, participants were required to pay attention to two tasks at once called concurrent multitasking , while in others they needed to switch attention between tasks called sequential multitasking.
The researchers measured reaction time and accuracy for the multitasking experiments against a control condition performing one task only. They found multitasking substantially affected the speed and accuracy of completing the tasks for both men and women. There was no difference between the groups. My colleagues and I recently busted another relevant myth — that women are better at seeing mess than men. We found men and women equally rated a space as messy. They were required to classify figures according to shape, namely round or square, and classify them according to number, i.
Researchers calculated the volumes of gray and white matter in the entire brain and in selected areas. Regardless of gender or age, task-switching usually activates the dorsolateral prefrontal areas of the brain, the inferior parietal lobes, and the inferior occipital gyrus. The study revealed that compared with women, young men aged between had greater bilateral activation in the prefrontal areas and higher activity in the right parietal lobe and insula. In addition, men displayed bilateral activation of the supplementary motor area, which was not observed in women.
Age seemed to somewhat impact the results. The observed brain activation was localized in younger adults but became more diffused with age. No correlation between BOLD signals and age was noticed between the ages of in women and between in men. However, after this age, researchers found an increase in the number of brain areas activated in both men and women.
Gender differences also became negligible with age, as researchers did not register any significant differences in men and women aged between While there have been some scientific studies that have found a female advantage in multitasking, other studies have found either no sex differences or a male advantage.
A team of researchers set out to test this once again, using a computer simulation that mimicked an everyday situation—a method that allowed them to create a real-world environment while controlling for a number of variables.
They found no differences between male and female participants. In fact, a quick Google search leads to many press articles claiming a female advantage. For example, women came out as better multitaskers when researchers used fMRI scans to measure brain activity, computer tests to measure response times, and an exercise in which people walking on a treadmill had to simultaneously complete a cognitive task.
Yet there are a few tasks in which men and women consistently outperform each other — on average: For example, it is well-established that men typically fare better when imagining what complex 3-dimensional figures would look like if they were rotated. In turn, women reliably outperform men in certain verbal abilities such as remembering a list of words or other verbal content. One reason for these inconsistent findings may be that, to date, the vast majority of studies have examined gender differences using artificial laboratory tasks that do not match with the complex and challenging multitasking activities of everyday life.
Another possible culprit is that different researchers define multitasking differently. In some experiments, participants were required to pay attention to two tasks at once called concurrent multitasking , while in others they needed to switch attention between tasks called sequential multitasking. The researchers measured reaction time and accuracy for the multitasking experiments against a control condition performing one task only.
They found multitasking substantially affected the speed and accuracy of completing the tasks for both men and women. There was no difference between the groups. My colleagues and I recently busted another relevant myth — that women are better at seeing mess than men. We found men and women equally rated a space as messy. The reason men do less cleaning than women may lie in the fact that women are held to higher standards of cleanliness than men, rather than men's "dirt blindness". Recent data shows Australian men are spending more time doing domestic work than they used to, but women still do the vast majority of housework.
Working Australian women have seen their total time across work and family activities increase over time, with bread-winning mothers spending four hours more across these activities per week than bread-winning fathers. This means working mums are balancing planning birthday parties, childcare drop offs and ballet lessons all on top of their regular jobs, commutes and careers.
If women's brains are equally strained by multitasking, why do we keep asking women to do this work? And, more importantly, what are the consequences? Our recent study shows mothers are more time pressed and report poorer mental health than fathers.
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