A long-running stereotype suggests men struggle more with multitasking than women, and one study set out to explore whether there could be a reason behind that perception.
Traditional household roles have shifted dramatically over time. While domestic responsibilities were once more commonly handled by women at home, many modern households now divide chores far more evenly as both partners are likely to be working.
Even so, the debate over who handles several tasks at once more effectively has never really gone away. Women are often assumed to have the edge, but researchers wanted to see if that belief held up under closer examination.
To investigate, husband-and-wife researchers Dr Diana Szameitat and Dr Andre J. Szameitat carried out a study looking at how men and women coped with performing multiple activities at the same time.
The research, published in 2026 in Psychological Research, used a more realistic multitasking setup than many earlier lab tests. Rather than relying only on computer tasks, the team designed a series of everyday-style activities intended to mimic the kinds of interruptions and competing demands people face in ordinary life.
The researchers at Brunel University of London recruited 41 men and 37 women, asking them to complete a number of tasks intended to mirror everyday situations.
When looking purely at how well the participants managed the tasks under pressure, the results showed little difference between men and women. The gap appeared when another demand was introduced at the same time.
Once participants also had to respond to spoken questions while carrying out the tasks, men were much more likely to miss those questions. More than a quarter of the male participants failed to answer them, compared with only one in 10 women.
The paper also looked at how outside observers judged the participants. In a second study, 160 people watched short clips of the multitasking and rated what they saw. Female participants were generally seen as more in control, more capable and less stressed, with their performance rated more positively overall.
That finding matters because it suggests the stereotype may not be based only on raw ability. Instead, the researchers argued that communication differences during multitasking — especially who keeps talking while juggling several things at once — may shape how people perceive competence.
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.”
He said the team was interested in understanding how this common belief may have formed in the first place.
“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.”
The idea for the experiment was partly drawn from the researchers’ own experience of balancing work with family life while raising two children.
“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.
In the second stage of the study, the researchers showed short clips of the male and female participants completing their tasks to a separate group of 80 neutral observers, who were then asked to judge what they saw.
According to those observers, men appeared to cope less well once questioning was added into the mix. The male participants were judged 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’.
The researchers said their findings fit with earlier work suggesting that there is no simple, universal difference in multitasking ability between men and women. Instead, performance can depend heavily on the type of tasks involved, how attention is split, and whether verbal interaction is part of the challenge.
That helps explain why the idea of women being naturally better multitaskers has persisted for so long. In everyday life, multitasking is rarely just about moving between chores; it often involves listening, speaking, remembering, and responding while trying to keep several things on track at once.
So while the study does not suggest that women are inherently better at every form of multitasking, it does offer a possible reason people may keep thinking that they are: if a person is more likely to keep talking while doing several jobs, they may simply look more capable under pressure.