Women win multitasking battle of sexes

It’s official – scientists have shown that women are better at multitasking than men.

The popular belief was tested by researchers who measured the ability of men and women to carry out multiple tasks. Both in the laboratory and more real world situations, women came out top.

Although many people are convinced women are better than men at focusing on different jobs at once, very little research has been conducted to test this hypothesis.

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In the first part of the study, 120 men and 120 women were tested on how well they can switch rapidly between two simple computer tasks.

Both men and women slowed down when alternating between two tasks, but men became more sluggish. Their performance speed slowed by 77 per cent compared with 69 per cent for women.

In the “real world” multitasking test, a different group of 47 men and the same number of women faced three everyday challenges.

They were asked to sketch out how they would attempt a search for a set of lost keys in a field, to locate restaurants on a map, and to solve simple maths questions.

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Women developed far better strategies for finding the keys, said Prof Keith Laws, from the University of Hertfordshire. “This one significant advantage for women on the key search task suggests they may be superior at tasks requiring high-level cognitive control, particularly planning, monitoring and inhibition.”