Are women really better at multi-tasking? Adapted from The Week July 20, 2010 It's official: Women really are better than men at juggling more than one task at once. At least, that's the claim being made by a team of British researchers. They gathered 100 students — 50 men and 50 women — and gave them eight minutes to perform three tasks at the same time. They all got the same tasks, which included solving simple math problems, finding restaurants on a map, and devising a strategy for finding a lost key in an imaginary field. Then, while they were juggling those assignments, the subjects received a telephone call, which they could answer or ignore. If they answered, they were asked some general knowledge questions while they continued the original tasks.
The women had few problems handling everything at once. In fact, 70 percent of them performed better than their average male counterparts. The men handled the math questions without many problems, and did OK pinpointing the map locations. But the women put them to shame when it came to the most complicated task, developing a plan for finding the lost key.
Men didn't approach the job logically. They just jumped into the middle of the field and dashed around looking for the key, never managing to cover the entire area. Women, however, tended to start in one corner, and methodically search the whole field moving out in concentric circles or lines. "It shows that women are better at being able to stand back," says one researcher, "and reflect for a moment while they are juggling other things."
However, there is evidence that multitasking is a drag on productivity for pretty much everyone, regardless of gender. The reason for that relates to basic structure of the brain: The right and left hemispheres cooperate when working on a single task, says researcher Dr. Etienne Koechlin. "But in two tasks, one hemisphere covers the reward of one task and the other hemisphere covers the reward of the other." That, unfortunately, applies to both genders.