Yep, it’s that time of the week when a study says that one gender is better than the other gender at something, and we all get outraged and/or jokey. Despite your general jadedness when it comes to questions of this nature, the results of the study have potentially massive implications for modern work life.
A group of psychologists published their findings in the BMC Journal of Psychology. Yes, women are better at multitasking than men.
This, from the Beeb:
First, they compared 120 women and 120 men in a computer test which involves switching between tasks involving counting and shape-recognition.
Men and women were equal when tasks were tackled one at a time. But when the tasks were mixed up there was a clear difference.
Both women and men slowed down, and made more mistakes, as the switching became more rapid.
But the men were significantly slower – taking 77% longer to respond, whereas women took 69% longer.
To make the experiment more relevant to everyday life, the researchers tried a second test.
A group of women and men were given eight minutes to complete a series of tasks – locating restaurants on a map, doing simple maths problems, answering a phone call, and deciding how they would search for a lost key in a field.
Completing all these assignments in eight minutes was impossible – so it forced men and women to prioritise, organise their time, and keep calm under pressure.
In the key search task in particular, women displayed a clear performance advantage over men, says co-author Prof Keith Laws, of the University of Hertfordshire.
You can read the whole paper, here.
[Source : BBC]
