🎗️Why Do Men Seem Worse At Multitasking?
Are women really better at multitasking? A new study suggests not. Men and women performed similarly on a complex task simulating everyday situations. The main difference lay in conversation: men responded to fewer questions, leading others to rate their performance more poorly.
The idea that women are naturally better at multitasking is widely held. But is it actually true?
A new study suggests it is not. Men and women performed very similarly when handling multiple tasks at once. The key difference appeared elsewhere: while multitasking, men failed to answer conversational questions far more often than women. This difference influenced how others evaluated their performance.
To test multitasking ability in a way that more closely mirrors real life, researchers created a scenario quite different from traditional computer-based tests.
Forty-one men and 37 women participated in the first experiment. Instead of simply pressing buttons or solving problems on a screen, they had to perform five simultaneous activities spread across three tables. The main activity was a cooking simulation: participants had to follow a recipe using toy ingredients and utensils.
But cooking was only part of the challenge. During the activity, a timer would sound at increasingly shorter intervals, forcing participants to pause the recipe and quickly perform other tasks using paper and pencil. At the same time, they had to watch a distant screen and identify specific words appearing in a particular color, recording each one.
As if that weren't enough, a new question was presented via loudspeaker every 20 seconds. These were open-ended questions requiring more elaborate answers, such as choosing between losing all one's money or all one's photographs, and explaining the reason why.
The test lasted 10 minutes, and researchers gradually increased the pressure on the participants. Initially, there was more time to complete each task. Later, the intervals became increasingly shorter, creating a situation similar to those moments when we need to cook, attend to something, answer someone, and still pay attention to what is happening around us.
This allowed researchers to observe not only whether men and women could perform the tasks, but also what happened when the situation became faster-paced and more stressful.
The result was surprising: men and women performed similarly on most tasks. There was no overall advantage for women in multitasking. The major difference lay in the conversation.
Men failed to answer questions more than twice as often as women. This does not necessarily mean they were less capable of performing the other activities. One possibility is that, faced with multiple simultaneous demands, they prioritized certain tasks and set the conversation aside.
The researchers then conducted a second experiment to determine whether this difference might affect how others perceive men and women during a multitasking situation.
They videotaped the participants and showed the recordings to 160 people who had not taken part in the first experiment. These observers were asked to evaluate, among other characteristics, how much control each participant appeared to have over the situation, as well as their performance and stress levels.
The women were rated as having more control, performing better, and experiencing less stress. Crucially, these ratings were strongly influenced by how the participants handled the conversation task.
Thus, the study found no evidence that women are better at multitasking in general. The difference may lie more in how men and women manage specific aspects of a complex situation, and in how that behavior is perceived by others.
If men speak less or leave questions unanswered when overwhelmed, others might interpret this behavior as a sign of higher stress or a lack of control. Over time, such situations may even help explain the origin and persistence of the stereotype that women are better at multitasking.
READ MORE:
Men talk less than women during multitasking
Szameitat AJ and Szameitat DP
Psychological Research 90, 93 (2026).
Abstract:
Contrary to the widespread stereotype that women are better at multitasking than men, no consistent sex differences in multitasking abilities between males and females have been found. We developed a novel multitasking paradigm consisting of five tasks designed to simulate real-life scenarios. In Study 1, 41 males and 37 females (the ‘multitaskers’) performed similarly in all tasks except a conversation task, which males ignored more than twice as often as females. To test whether this sex difference is noticeable to others, in Study 2 160 naïve observers watched videos of the multitaskers and rated their appearance. Females were rated as being more in control of the task, performing better, and being less stressed than males. Importantly, these ratings were strongly influenced by the conversation task performance. Therefore, this study not only showed a sex difference in multitasking performance but also that this difference impacts how multitaskers are perceived by others, providing a potential explanation for the development of a stereotype that women are better at multitasking than men.
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