Aachen, Germany – Women are no better at multitasking than men, a new study by researchers at a German university has found
after conducting tests on 48 women and 48 men.
According to the team led by Patricia Hirsch of the RWTH Aachen
University, both sexes worked more slowly and less accurately when
required to perform two tasks at the same time. The tasks involved
numbers and letters.
Reporting their findings in the journal Plos One, the team said they
found no difference between the sexes, although they noted that
previous studies had come to very different conclusions.
In some cases, women did better, and in others, men. Some of the
earlier studies also found no difference.
The Aachen team said the tasks set could have caused sex differences
to show up, as no single experiment could possible test all types of
multitasking, along with the skills needed for them.
Subjects were asked to identify letters appearing on a screen as
vowels or consonants and then to determine whether numbers were even
or odd.
In some of the tests, they had to perform both tasks at the same
time, and in others switch rapidly from one task to the other.
"Our results do not confirm the widely believed prejudice than women
are better at multitasking than men," the team said, at least not in
the tests they conducted as exemplary for certain challenges.
Hirsch identified three everyday categories: updating working memory,
switching from one task to another and filtering out irrelevant
information.
An example of the first is driving from a zone with one speed limit
into another. Switching between writing an email and making a phone
call is an example of the second. Ignoring information at a traffic
light for turning traffic when proceeding straight exemplifies the
third.
The team acknowledged the limits of its research. "The current study
does not permit conclusions on differences between the sexes in other
multitasking situations," it said.
Lutz Jaencke, a neuropsychologist from the University of Zurich who
participated in the study, said differences between the sexes would
not be logical in evolutionary terms.
"There is no genetic ultimate reason for assuming that the Homo
sapiens woman was better pre-programmed 150 000 years ago to be
basically better at multitasking than a man. That's completely
unreasonable," Jaencke said.
"Multitasking is something that we humans can do extremely badly," he
said. The human brain is designed to concentrate on the matter in
hand. "It has to suppress irrelevant information in order to allow
the relevant stuff through."
Jaencke noted a general problem with previous studies. Those finding
significant differences were widely reported, while those finding
none were often not published.