In the morning, she has breakfast and answers work emails while giving instructions to her children about the day's commitments; at lunchtime, she pays bills with a few clicks while eating her meal.
One eye on electronic school registers and back in a meeting. Evening comes, and after picking up the children from afternoon classes and having dinner, while cooking for the next day's lunch, she tells a fairy tale to the little one at home and finishes scrolling through school chats, already planning the next day's calendar in her mind.
It's a busy daily life for women, who have to divide themselves among multiple roles: mother, worker who takes care of her career, caregiver for elderly family members, citizen attentive to her duties, partner.
Thanks to the continuous overlapping of plans, a modern stereotype depicts them as decidedly more "multitasking" than men.
But is that so? Is she really better than him at doing several things at once?
A new study published in the journal Psychological Research debunks the myth that there is an imbalance between men and women in the ability to manage multiple tasks at the same time.
The authors demonstrate that there are no general differences between the sexes in this regard, except for one detail.
On one point, she has an edge: during multitasking, she can also maintain a dialogue, while men, when engaged on different fronts, tend to ignore conversations more frequently.
Research by British experts simulated real-life multitasking performance to assess potential male-female discrepancies.
When coordinating different tasks, men ignored the conversation task more than twice as often as women, while showing similar performance in all others.
Multitasking, defined as the ability to perform multiple tasks simultaneously or to switch rapidly from one to another, has become a central feature of modern life, manifesting in contexts such as driving, work, household activities, and even leisure.
Despite the widespread stereotype about women's superiority in practicing it, the research actually showed only minimal and inconsistent gender differences, questioning the existence of a significant gap in this area.
Investigating quality and speed
With the support of the Bial Foundation, researchers Andre and Diana Szameitat (from Brunel University London and City St George's, University of London, respectively) investigated both to clarify whether gender differences truly exist in multitasking and to explore possible explanations for the origin of this stereotype.
In the article – titled "Men talk less than women during multitasking" – they explain that they developed a complex paradigm consisting of five tasks designed to simulate real-life scenarios, which reproduces daily demands more faithfully than most previous studies.
In the first test, 41 men and 37 women performed five different tasks: following a recipe in the kitchen; looking up a phone number; matching numbers and letters; monitoring words in a presentation; and answering a question (for example, "Would you rather lose all your money and valuables or all the photos you've taken, and why?") every 20 seconds.
To verify if this gender difference was perceptible to others, 160 observers, unaware of any preliminary information, watched videos of the participants and evaluated their performance. In the different tasks, men and women showed similar performance, with the exception of the conversation task, which men ignored more than twice as often as women.
However, when they did perform the conversation task, it should be noted that the quality and speed of their responses did not differ from those of women.
No general differences
A possible explanation suggested by the authors for the different ability to dialogue during multitasking is that women, on average, may engage more in communicative behaviours in social contexts.
However, this hypothesis has not been directly tested in the study and should be interpreted with caution, they warn.
The results are consistent with evolutionary theories that propose a greater propensity for conversational behaviour among women.
Regarding others' perception of this, the study investigated this aspect by having observers watch the participants' performance. And these observers rated men engaged in multiple activities as less in control of the task, with poorer performance, less inclined to effort, less attentive, less happy, and less gratified compared to women engaged in multiple activities.
The study therefore demonstrates that there are no general differences between men and women in the ability to perform multiple activities simultaneously, but rather a specific difference in terms of conversations. It also highlighted how this difference influences how people are evaluated by others, potentially leading to the perception of lower performance by men.
This helps to explain why the idea of the super multitasking woman has spread and persists. "Overall, our data confirm that there are no substantial differences between the sexes in visuo-manual cognitive tasks, but that there are significant differences between the sexes in the ability to maintain a conversation while performing multiple activities simultaneously," comments Andre Szameitat.
"This is a very important skill in everyday life and therefore," he concludes, "it could explain the development of the widespread public stereotype that women are better than men at multitasking." – Adnkronos International, Rome/Tribune News Service
