“Women Are Better Than Men”–Public Beliefs on Gender Differences and Other Aspects in Multitasking

Abstract

Reports in public media suggest the existence of a stereotype that women are better at multitasking than men. The present online survey aimed at supporting this incidental observation by empirical data. For this, 488 participants from various ethnic backgrounds (US, UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Turkey, and others) filled out a self-developed online-questionnaire. Results showed that overall more than 50% of the participants believed in gender differences in multitasking abilities. Of those who believed in gender differences, a majority of 80% believed that women were better at multitasking. The main reasons for this were believed to be an evolutionary advantage and more multitasking practice in women, mainly due to managing children and household and/or family and job. Findings were consistent across the different countries, thus supporting the existence of a widespread gender stereotype that women are better at multitasking than men. Further questionnaire results provided information about the participants’ self-rated own multitasking abilities, and how they conceived multitasking activities such as childcare, phoning while driving, and office work.

Putting a stereotype to the test: The case of gender differences in multitasking costs in task-switching and dual-task situations

“…It is a widely held belief that women outperform men in multitasking situations, possibly because of an evolutionary advantage and extensive multitasking practice resulting from managing children, household, and jobs [1, 2]. In fact, two recent studies showed that the majority of participants was convinced that gender differences in multitasking existed and at least 80% of them attributed better multitasking abilities to women than to men [1, 3].…”

Gender Differences in Polychronicity

“…The EMS contains some items with a rather liberal interpretation of multitasking, for instance listening to music or singing during an activity. Such activities impose low cognitive demands ( Szameitat et al, 2015 ) and therefore, people are more inclined to engage in them (69% of women and 49% of males, see above). The MPI focusses more on the work context and virtually exclusively uses the terms task and project .…”

“…It is important to note that our data are self-rated measures, and that there is little evidence that women actually would engage more in multitasking or that they would be better at it ( Szameitat et al, 2015 ). For instance, Buser and Peter (2011) conducted a study in which participants had to perform several office tasks in different regimes enforcing either single- or multitasking, or leaving the decision to the participants.…”

“…For instance, polychronicity is often considered to be a trait, and thus can be seen as a rather stable characteristic to describe personality ( Slocombe and Bluedorn, 1999 ). Furthermore, it has been proposed that virtually every job nowadays requires some form of multitasking, leading to an interest in polychronicity from organizational and managerial perspectives ( Bühner et al, 2006 ; Szameitat et al, 2015 ). For instance, it has been shown that polychronicity has a unique contribution in explaining job performance ( Kantrowitz et al, 2012 ) and that it modulates the relationship between actual multitasking abilities and job performance ( Sanderson et al, 2013 ).…”

“…This finding is somewhat surprising, because there is a strong and widespread belief in the general public that women are better than men at multitasking ( Strobach and Woszidlo, 2015 ; Szameitat et al, 2015 ). In a previous study of us ( Szameitat et al, 2015 ), we observed some initial evidence (unpublished data) that women might show higher polychronicity than men. Therefore, the aim of the current study was to follow up this initial observation and to test whether there is a gender difference in polychronicity, i.e., the preference to multitask.…”