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Ah, the eternal debate - who is better at multi-tasking....men or women? I know how most of us would answer - hands down WOMEN! Why? Because we (the collective "we" of course) honestly feel we are more capable of doing multiple things at once. And not just doing them, but doing them well! But ask almost any man and they would tend to disagree. Go ahead, ask your husband....I'll wait. (Insert Jeopardy music.......) Did he disagree with you? Thought so! So I set off to look into this topic online to get down to the bottom of it and came up with some interesting information, which I will now share with you!
According to Dr. Sanjay Gupta (the CNN Medical Correspondent) in this transcript, the idea that women multi-task better than men is purely perception. He goes on to say that while there aren't any real studies that conclude this is truth, the experts do believe this notion and believe it has to do with the evolution of the mother's role in the family. Simply put, the mom has to manage multiple tasks at the same time in order to keep her house functioning while the father's role (which is thought to be a single task) is to go out and get food (or in today's society, get money to pay for food). If that is what, over time, has made us better multi-taskers, then what happens when the man is the primary "caretaker/househusband?" Will he learn to multi-task just as well as a woman over time? Or will he never be able to multi-task as well as a woman no matter what because his brain isn't wired the same way ours is? To try and find answers to this question, I delved further into this debate.
I was able to find one biological theory as to why women are capable of multi-tasking better than men. According to a Missouri Western State University study found here, the area of the brain that handles the communication between the two hemispheres (known as the corpus collossum, but I'm trying not to get too scientific in this post!) is wider in a woman's brain, which "might enable the two sides to communicate better with each other." Sounds good to me! I only know a bit about the brain, but sounds like this makes perfect sense!
But there is another way of looking at "multi-tasking." One could say that trying to multi-task can defeat the purpose since doing TOO many things at once makes it hard to do any one thing well and can also make it harder to concentrate. According to that same study listed above, "The average worker’s functioning IQ...drops 10 points when multi-tasking. That is more than double the four point drop that occurs when someone smokes marijuana." Wow! So I guess if this is true, moms should stop trying to be "supermom" and do EVERYTHING all at once, huh!?
We may never truly know the "answer" to this debate, but it honestly doesn't matter because I bet women will always feel they are better at multi-tasking than their male counterparts. Sure, there are some men out there who could give us a run for our money, but could most men cook dinner while holding a baby and at the same time have a phone conversation while keeping the other ear on the child in the next room? Not sure. And no offense to the men out there, but maybe the only thing that may be better at multi-tasking than a woman is a robot (a female robot, of course!).
Do you think women are better at multi-tasking than men? Why or why not?
