Are Women Better at Multitasking? What the Research Actually Shows
The stereotype is confident. The evidence is not. Change the kind of multitasking being tested, and the apparent winner can change with it.
The idea that women are naturally better multitaskers appears in jokes, workplace conversations, family arguments, and headlines about the brain. It often feels true because people can easily point to a woman managing several visible responsibilities while a man appears absorbed in one.
But “multitasking” covers several different problems: switching between rules, performing two simple tasks together, monitoring several streams, remembering future intentions, and planning an open-ended sequence of activities. A study can find a difference in one of these without discovering a general multitasking advantage.
The most defensible conclusion is that women are not consistently better at multitasking overall. Some studies find a small female advantage, some find a male advantage, and many find no meaningful difference. The task used—and the abilities hidden inside it—matters more than the stereotype suggests.
This is why Cognitive Train separates different demands across its cognitive training tools rather than treating multitasking as one fixed trait.
Why the Question Is Harder Than It Sounds
Suppose one experiment asks people to alternate between colour and shape rules. Another asks them to monitor several clocks and complete errands. A third combines a visual response with an auditory response. All may be called multitasking studies, but they do not measure the same thing.
Group comparisons can also be shaped by related abilities. A monitoring task built around locations may draw heavily on spatial skill. A task involving conversation may depend more on verbal fluency and the decision to keep responding under pressure. Practice, occupation, strategy, and familiarity can affect performance before any biological explanation is considered.
One more caution: studies often use the labels “sex” and “gender” inconsistently and usually compare people recorded as female or male. Their results describe averages in particular samples—not what any individual woman or man can do.
The Study That Appeared to Support the Stereotype
One of the most widely discussed studies came from Stoet and colleagues in 2013. In a computer task, 120 women and 120 men alternated between different classifications. Everyone slowed when the tasks were mixed, but the slowdown was larger among the men. The reported difference was small, with an effect size of Cohen’s d = 0.27.
A second experiment placed 47 women and 47 men in a more everyday scenario involving arithmetic, a map search, phone questions, and planning how to locate a lost key. Most measures showed no significant difference, but women produced better strategies for the key-search task.
Those findings provided limited support for a female advantage under specific conditions. The authors themselves warned against broad generalisation because so little research had directly tested the stereotype.
Other Tests Produced the Opposite—or Nothing
A study by Mäntylä in 2013 used a monitoring task that required participants to manage several changing time-based demands. Men performed better in that particular paradigm, and the difference was connected to spatial ability. That does not establish a general male advantage; it shows how the construction of the task can tilt which supporting skill matters.
In 2019, Hirsch and colleagues compared women and men across sequential and concurrent multitasking. Both groups showed the expected loss in speed and accuracy when demands were combined, but the researchers found no substantial gender difference across the task-switching and dual-task conditions.
An everyday simulation reached a similar conclusion. Hirnstein and colleagues tested participants in a virtual meeting-preparation task involving errands, prospective memory, navigation, and distractor management. None of the multitasking measures showed a sex difference, and the reported effects were extremely small.
Then a 2021 study complicated the picture again. Lui and Wong found a smaller concurrent dual-task cost among men, but no difference in sequential task-switching cost. The result contradicted the neat idea that women excel at switching while men excel at simultaneous performance.
What the Research Pattern Looks Like
The literature does not point in one stable direction.
Women have sometimes shown lower switch costs or stronger planning in particular laboratory and everyday-style tasks.
Men have sometimes performed better on spatial monitoring or concurrent dual-task paradigms.
Several direct comparisons find that multitasking slows or disrupts both groups to a similar degree.
Variation within each group is far greater than a stereotype can capture about a particular person.
Why the Stereotype Can Still Feel True
A stereotype does not need a large performance difference to survive. It may grow from who is seen managing multiple responsibilities, which tasks remain visible, and how performance is judged.
In a survey of 488 participants from several countries, Szameitat and colleagues found that more than half believed gender differences in multitasking existed. Among those believers, 80% said women were better. Common explanations involved childcare, household demands, experience, or an assumed natural predisposition—beliefs, not proof of an underlying ability.
A newer study offers another clue. In a 2026 real-life-style multitasking experiment, women and men performed similarly on four visual-manual tasks. The difference appeared in conversation: men failed to answer more of the spoken questions. Observers then rated women as looking more in control and performing better, even though the broader task performance was similar.
That suggests appearance can matter. Continuing to talk while busy may look like superior multitasking, while silently prioritising another task may look like struggling. It is an intriguing explanation, not a final verdict, and the finding still needs replication.
Test Skills, Not Stereotypes
An individual result cannot settle a population question, but it can show where your own cost appears. The Task Switch Test isolates rule changes. The Dual Task Challenge combines visual and auditory demands, while the Dual-Stream Reaction Test measures parallel monitoring.
Cognitive Train’s Multitasking Test brings four short demands together and reports them separately. That is more useful than comparing yourself with a gender stereotype, because people can be strong in one form of multitasking and weaker in another.
For a broader view of attention, memory, processing speed, and reasoning, explore Cognitive Train’s online cognitive and brain tests.
The Verdict
Research does not support the claim that women are universally better multitaskers. It also does not show that men have a general advantage. Instead, small differences appear and disappear as researchers change the task, the supporting abilities, and the way performance is scored.
The stereotype asks which group is better. The more useful question asks which mental demand is causing the cost.
Continue with the abilities hidden inside multitasking, or explore the full collection of multitasking tests and research-based guides.