continued: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24645100It's not a myth - women really are better than men at multitasking, at least in certain cases, a study says.
Men were slower and less organised than women when switching rapidly between tasks in tests by UK psychologists.
Both sexes struggled to cope with juggling priorities, but men suffered more on average, according to the paper in the journal BMC Psychology.
It says: "The question now is why? And is it all types of multitasking, or only certain situations?"
The researchers hope to encourage more research on a topic which they say has attracted "astonishingly few" studies - considering how often the "women vs men" debate crops up in conversation.
If men really are slower than women, it could have serious implications for how workplaces are organised, says co-author Dr Gijsbert Stoet, of the University of Glasgow.
"Multitasking is getting more and more important in the office - but it's very distracting, all these gadgets interrupting our workflow.
"It could be that men suffer more from this constant switching," he told BBC News.
Previous studies on gender and multitasking have drawn widely different conclusions.
One experiment in China found that women outperformed their male counterparts, while another in Sweden found that men may actually be better than women at multitasking when spatial tasks are involved.
To settle the argument, Dr Stoet and a colleague set out to compare women and men in a certain type of multitasking; the kind we use when faced with juggling many tasks in rapid succession - but not quite simultaneously.
These might include office workers who jump between incoming emails, phone calls and assignments, while running in and out of meetings. Another example might be parents in the household - cooking a meal while looking after young children and suddenly having to answer the phone.
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.
"This difference may seem small, but it adds up" over a working day or week, said Dr Stoet.
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.
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