Both question and title are inspired by Cherie Blair’s mitigating plea of having to “juggle a lot of balls” in her daily life, which recalled the old chestnut of women being better at multi-tasking than men. I’ve seen and hear a lot of anecdotal evidence, but I’m curious: does anyone know of any studies that have shown, or disproved, this particular piece of modern folklore?
I suppose we could hypothesise that in pre/proto-humans, multi-tasking might be a significant advantage for the females, being tied to the offspring (particularly nursing infants who are entirely dependent) - along with other tasks that might be expected of any individual tied to the dwelling, single-mindedness, on the other hand, might be a slight advantage to the individuals that go out and clobber the wooly mammoths (or whatever).
Of course I realise the above relies rather heavily on terribly stereotyped roles; I’m not going to defend this hypothesis very valiantly.
Well, I can see your argument, but as you suggest it 's probably a lot more nuanced than that. I have discovered, so far, that women’s connection between brain hemispheres is four times larger than that of men (on average). This might make it easier to concentrate on different tasks at once, or so it is theorised. On the other hand, studies about the safety of driving with cell phones apparently show no significant gender imbalance - and that would strike me as a clear cut case of multi-tasking. On the third hand, it seems that women are held to make better fighter pilots, but I’m not sure if that’s an urban legend or not.
A lot of people believe women make better multi-taskers (almost all women of my acquaintance for a start), but is there any proof?
A friend of mine used to be a professional juggler. He told me that there were relatively few women who were performing jugglers, and the same was reflected among amateurs at conventions and juggling clubs.
So I guess there’s no evidence of women being better jugglers in the literal sense! But then again, maybe they just weren’t drawn to the activity…
Even if it’s not an UL, it may not be terribly helpful data; I can see two possible problems, sample size and possible institutional bias - if it is harder for a woman to become a fighter pilot than it is for a man (i.e. the selection criteria are unbalanced), then the women that make it through would be the exceptional ones.
In my worthless experience though, women seem to be better ‘organisers’ than men when dealing with a larger-than-average set of smaller-than-average problems.
I would half-heartedly venture to make the possibly quite unreasonable-sounding suggestion that posession of breasts (particularly if they are on the large side) can be something of a hindrance to the activity of literal juggling.
I think it may be time for me to take cover now.