WHEN IT COMES TO MULTITASKING, WOMEN ARE BETTER

Busy women who juggle home and career often claim to be better at multitasking than men, and now there’s evidence to support them. After administering several tests to 120 men and 120 women, British psychologists concluded that men have more trouble juggling priorities—and are slower and less organized than women when switching between them. The researchers found that men and women were equally adept at completing two tasks on a computer when they could tackle them one at a time, but men’s performance slowed more substantially—by 77 percent compared with 69 percent for women—when they were forced to switch rapidly between the tasks. (click below to read more)
In another experiment, participants were given eight minutes to locate restaurants on a map, do simple math problems, answer the phone, and decide how to search for a lost key in a field. Particularly in the lost-key challenge, women outperformed men, who were more impulsive and failed to think through their search. University of Hertfordshire psychologist Keith Laws tells BBC.com that the study suggests that “in a stressed and complex situation, women are more able to stop and think about what’s going on in front of them.”