Claims that women are innately better at multitasking are a myth, a leading female academic said yesterday.
Professor Gina Rippon said stereotypes which purport to be based on science are just allowing men and women to ‘wimp out’ of doing things based on their sex.
She said women become ‘wired’ for multi-tasking not because of anything biological, but because that is what society expects of them.
Prof Rippon, from Aston University, said the segregation between girls and boys even occurs from a young age – with them being given different toys to play with and different books to read – which could change the way their brains develop.
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She said the age-old concept that men are from Mars and women are from Venus was just ‘trash’.
Traditional studies have often attempted to prove that women are better with social skills, remembering things and multi-tasking, while men are more aggressive, better at maths and worse at listening. But the neuroscientist told an audience at the British Science Festival, being held at Swansea University, that boys’ toys can often be more training-based while girls’ toys encourage nurturing.
‘I’d say to the scientific community, can we please stop talking about sex?,’ Prof Rippon said.
‘Stop dividing your data into two categories, you are losing so much information,’
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‘Not only are we feeding the “neuro-trash” industry misunderstanding about what we do, but we are also feeding the inner wimp of people out there who believe they can or can’t do something based on whether they are male or female.’
She added: ‘There is no such thing as a male or female brain.
‘There is no one aspect of the brain which, if a scientist looked at it, they could tell whether it came from a man or a woman.
‘We shouldn’t be talking about sex differences in the brain. The brain is a mosaic and every brain is different for every individual.
‘Using our neuroscience resources to measure differences is actually a waste of time. It’s more interesting to see what makes individual brains different.’
Daily Mail