WOMEN AREN’T better at MULTITASKING than men, they just don’t have a choice!

Throughout history women have been hailed for their great multitasking abilities.

The majority of the time it’s us women looking after their kids and running the household.

But it’s actually an age-old myth that we are ‘biologically’ better at juggling more things at the same time than men are.

In fact, researchers have poured hot water all over this gender-stereotypical belief….

WOMEN aren’t better at MULTITASKING than men, study finds

The study, which was published in PLOS One, found that women are actually no better than men when it comes to multitasking!

Experts compared the abilities of 48 men and 48 women in performance of letter or number identification tasks.

The results highlighted that women’s brains are no more efficient at switching tasks or juggling multiple tasks at the same time when compared to men.

Previous studies have found that BOTH men and women struggle to manage multiple activities at the same time.

BUT we are good as a species at switching between actives, which may feel like we are doing lots of different jobs at once.

Maybe we believe women are better multitaskers purely because they have no choice but to be.

We learn how to feed our babies while also taking care of the rest of the family, look after the household and doing a variety of different tasks.

Patricia Hirsch, lead author of the study by Aachen University in Germany, says: ‘It is a widely held belief that women outperform men in multitasking situations, possibly because of an evolutionary advantage and extensive multitasking practice resulting from managing children, household, and jobs.

“In fact, two recent studies showed that the majority of participants was convinced that gender differences in multitasking existed and at least 80 per cent of them attributed better multitasking abilities to women than to men.

“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.

“The present findings strongly suggest that there are no substantial gender differences in multitasking performance across task-switching and dual-task paradigms, which predominantly measure cognitive control mechanisms such as working memory updating, the engagement and disengagement of task sets, and inhibition.”

So there you have it. Men, it’s time you stepped up! You’re just as capable – or incapable as the study suggests – at us at multitasking.

No more excuses.