A couple of months ago I found on this forum information about female being better in multi-tasking.

(see:http://hv.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=00C19S)

The answer of Paul Kleinginna was very clear and I 'd like to use that information for my masterthesis. However, I do need then a references So my question is, does anyone (Paul Kleinginna himself or other people), know where I can find scientific references about this topic? Thanks in advance.

-- Marije van 't Verlaat (s636413@uvt.nl), March 01, 2005

Answers

Hi Marije, I could not find a definitive study supporting women being better at multitasking. I found research by David Myers et al. at U. of Michigan, that did not find a significant gender difference on multitasking, but he concluded more research is needed on this gender issue. For example, I can think of many pairs of tasks that could be tested. I found research by Marcel Jost at Carnegie Mellon University indicating that multitasking can be stressful and may even slightly damage the brain. It would be nice to find a gender difference in multitasking, because there are already biological (females have larger corpus callosum and more white brain cells) and evolutionary explanations (men needed to be focused on hunting trips and war, while females had to engage in multitasking with kids and preparing food) out there if it exists. The theory of female multitasking is also part of our folk knowledge, so maybe there is some truth to it. I would not be surprised if future research showed gender differences in various types of multitasking, sometimes favoring male multitasking and sometimes female multitasking. I also expect that they may find gender differences in tolerance for taking on multitasking (and maybe also taking on tedious tasks). Let us know if you find any early articles on females doing better on multitasking. I apologize if I mislead you with my earlier posting, in which I was too quick to support the theory of female superiority in multitasking. Paul

-- Paul Kleinginna (prk@frontiernet.net), March 02, 2005.