9 Questions Men Have For Women Answered By Science

5. Are Women Really Better At Multitasking?

First things first, there's technically no such thing as multitasking. The thing we think of as multitasking as actually the brain quickly switching between tasks, as opposed to focussing on two things at once. In an attempt to prove this stereotype one way or another, scientists got a group of men and women together, with a 50/50 split, and gave them eight minutes to perform three different tasks at the same time. They had to solve simple maths problems, find restaurants on a map and sketch a plan for how they would search for a lost key in an imaginary field. They would also receive a phone call at some point during the experiment that they could choose to answer, at which point they would be given a general knowledge quiz. The genders performed pretty much equally in all the tasks and (although more women answered the phone than men) the men outperformed the women by a small margin in two of the tasks, with the exception of the key in the field. Even though men tend to be better than women at spatial tests, they often ended up coming up with less effective strategy like starting from the middle and spiralling outwards, whereas the female participants would start from one corner and work in straight lines. In another test, they also measured task-switching response times and found that women are more able to switch tasks without losing so much focus. The researchers found that women might be better at keeping a cool head when juggling different task, whereas men perform better when their focus remains unbroken. It's unclear whether these differences are biological or environmental. It might be that men have to be better at focussing on one task, for activities such as hunting for example, whereas women might have to have developed better multitasking skills for child-rearing purposes. So much for breaking down stereotypes...