‘Women better at multitasking than men’

LONDON - Psychologists have proven that women are much better than men at multitasking.

Keith Laws, professor and psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, who led the research, said: “We have all heard stories that either men can’t multitask or that women are exceptionally good at multitasking,” reports the Telegraph.

His team found that when women and men work on a number of simple tasks - such as searching for a key or doing easy maths problems - at the same time, the women significantly outperformed the men, said a University of Hertfordshire release.

Laws gave 50 male and 50 female students eight minutes to perform three tasks at the same time: carrying out simple maths problems, finding restaurants on a map and sketching a strategy for how they would search for a lost key in an imaginary field.

As they performed the tasks, the volunteers also received a phone call that they could either chose to answer or not.

If they did answer, they were given an additional general knowledge test while they continued to carry out their other activities.

While women were able to perform well in all four activities at once, men performed, on average, worse when it came to planning to search for the key.

Laws said: “Men are supposed to have better spatial awareness than women, so they should have outperformed the women on the map task and the key task.

“But of all the tasks we gave, the key searching task also required planning and some kind of strategy,” he said.

“It shows that women are better at being able to stand back and reflect for a moment while they are juggling other things,” Laws concluded.