in my psych class last year, we were discussing the possible differences between the male and female brain, gender roles, etc. We watched a tape as a part of the lesson and on it, several men and women were tested on their ability to perform a series of tasks in a certain amount of time. The men, it seemed, could only complete one task at a time; if they tried to do several things at once, they became disorganized and flustered. The women, on the other hand, were able to multi-task successfully.
are women better at multi-tasking than men? i suppose this belongs in Great Debates, but i’m not sure that it’s a subject that’s worthy of such greatness. is there is a difference between men and women in being able to divide the attention (as we also brought this experiment up in class discussion when covering the subject of Attention)? If so, why? Or is this just another fickle difference between males and females that doesn’t always apply.
That’s a pretty general question, but I can tell you that there was a study where men and women donned headphones and were exposed to multiple voices at once. The men could focus on a single voice and exclude the others, but the women couldn’t. Therefore the men could extract the meaning from the voice they focused on, but the women just heard a cacaphony.
This may be related to the desire to multi-task, although I wouldn’t conclude that it says who’s better at it. One might infer that women feel like they have to do everything that presents itself, where men focus on one thing.
My marriage is a microcosm of this theory. My wife is always multi-tasking and boasting of doing so, although trying to juggle so many things makes her stressed out all the time, and she tries to do even very low priority items that nobody would notice if they were neverdone. I focus on one high-priority item at a time because the context swithcing of multi-tasking introduces a lot of inefficiency, and you tend to perpetually have 5 things half done instead of two things all the way done.
As a lone male kindergarten teacher, I am always shaking my head how the career female teachers around me can multitask disparate activities, seemingly effortlessly. One co-worker in particular, yesterday, was 1) reorganizing her classroom 2) applying make-up for a date 3) fielding cell phone calls 4) writing out requisition forms and 5) holding conversations with several other colleagues in her room – all at the same time.
I am only successful at multitasking similar tasks, “successful” being my measure of getting about 50% of the task completed.
The other day, I saw a woman driving, talking on her cell phone and putting on her makeup all at the same time. This seems to be multi-tasking.
But, on the other hand, when we go walking with another couple, the men walk and talk simultaneously and the women cannot walk and talk at the same time. They stop to talk, but walk almost silently.
I suppose it depends on the abilities of each individual to multi-task.
i have to say i disagree with that because i find that my friends and i are able to walk and talk simultaneously all the time.
of course…my response just makes me realize how much more this ‘ability’ is based on the individual and not the sex of a person
Yes, I think women have, on average, better multi-tasking abilities than men. On average. I keep emphasizing that. Because there ARE men who can multi-task like a woman, and women who couldn’t multi-task to save their lives.
It’s like all those other male/female differences you hear about. You know - on average women are more verbal. On average men have better spatial abilities. Which is interesting and intruiging - as long as it’s not used to pigeon-hole people. Verbal, multi-tasking men deserve to exercise their talents just as much as women with extraordinary spatial visualization abilites should exercise their gifts.