Study reveals reason why women have a reputation for being better at multitasking than men

I'm sure you've likely heard about the stereotype that men are incapable of multitasking – and a now new study may have worked out why.

Once upon a time, housework was largely left to women who remained at home while their husband went out to work. Nowadays, however, it's much more common for household chores to be split 50/50 in light of societal changes and women working just as much as men.

Despite this, there's still been the age-old debate about who is better at multitasking and the consensus is usually that women are substantially better than their male counterparts.

But, is there any truth to this? Well, husband and wife Dr Diana Szameitat and Dr Andre J. Szameitat decided to find out for themselves.

A new experiment has looked at men and women's abilities to multitask (Getty Stock)

The pair are from Brunel University of London and, in an experiment involving 41 men and 37 women, they tasked people with carrying out a series of tasks designed to simulate real life.

In terms of how well the tasks were carried out under pressure, there was no difference between the two genders. The mens' weaknesses became clear when they had to carry out tasks and answer questions.

When the participants were given the additional task of responding to spoken questions, then men failed to answer more than 25 percent of the questions. Meanwhile, only one in ten women failed to answer the questions.

Discussing the study, Dr Andre J. Szameitat said (per a Brunel University news release): "There has always been this suspicion that sex differences do exist when it comes to multi-tasking.

"But until now, they had not been identified."

It was found that men struggled to answer questions and carry out tasks (Getty Stock)

He added: "Through our work, we wanted to shed light on why a potential stereotype might have developed.

"This reduced talkativeness amongst men could explain why males are likely to be rated as being worse at multitasking than women."

Apparently the Szameitats were inspired by their own busy lives of being parents to two kids for the experiment.

"We were thinking of our own lives with two kids and working out where the real challenges of multitasking lie for people," Dr Szameitat shared.

For. a second part of the experiment, short films of the male and female participants doing their tasks were played for group of 80 neutral observers so that they could give their judgements.

When the participants had to start answering questions, the observers found male multitaskers to be 'less in control of what they were doing, performing worse, using less effort, and liking the task less, as compared to the female multitasker'.