Men Actually Don’t Multitask Worse — They Just Stop Talking

Give a person five things to juggle at once, and something has to give. A new British study on multitasking found that when the pressure climbs, the thing men tend to drop is the conversation.

Researchers at Brunel University of London built a kitchen-like obstacle course of five overlapping chores and turned 78 volunteers loose on it. Men and women chopped, searched, and monitored a screen at nearly identical levels of skill. Only one task separated them: talking. Asked a steady stream of questions while they worked, men left more than twice as many hanging, unanswered, compared with women.

That single gap turned out to matter far beyond the lab. When a second group of strangers later watched video of the same volunteers, they judged the quieter men as more flustered, less capable, and less in command of the chaos, even though the men were keeping up on everything else. A moment of silence, it seems, reads to onlookers as someone falling apart.

Why any of this matters comes down to a belief almost everyone carries: that women are simply better at handling several things at once. Decades of lab work never found much evidence for a broad skill gap, which left an awkward question of where such a durable stereotype came from. By pulling talking apart from the physical chores, this study, published in Psychological Research, offers an answer that has less to do with ability and more to do with who keeps the conversation going when the room gets loud.

One Task Split Men and Women During Multitasking

To mimic the messy reality of doing several things at once, co-authors André J. Szameitat and Diana P. Szameitat set up five stations across three tables. Their main job was a pretend cooking task: follow a recipe, measure out fake ingredients, thread beads onto a string. On top of that, a kitchen timer kept ringing, sending volunteers off to hunt for phone numbers on a sheet, tick off letters and numbers in order, and watch a slideshow for words printed on a red background. All the while, a speaker piped in questions every 20 seconds, and volunteers were told to answer as though chatting with a friend, not in clipped one-word replies.

All 78 people analyzed (41 men and 37 women, average age around 23) rotated through the stations as the timer intervals shrank from 90 seconds down to 30, ratcheting up the stress over a 10-minute run. Scores on each task were leveled onto a common scale so the five very different jobs could be compared side by side.

On four of the five tasks, the sexes came out even. Cooking, phone-number searching, the letter-number task, and word-monitoring showed no meaningful difference between men and women. Conversation was the outlier. Women answered 24.76 of the 28 questions on average; men answered 20.24. Put another way, women left about 11.6 percent of the questions unanswered, while men left 27.7 percent, more than double the rate.

One detail complicates the easy read that men are simply worse talkers. When men did answer, their replies were just as fast and just as substantive as the women’s. Quality held steady. Quantity was the casualty. Men were not fumbling their words, they were letting the questions sail past. Why they skipped is not settled: the men may have missed the questions while focused elsewhere, or set them aside on purpose to protect the other jobs. Either way, the answers they did give held their caliber.

Where the Multitasking Stereotype Comes From

To chase down where the belief starts, the researchers needed to know not just how men and women performed, but how their performance looked to other people. So they ran a second experiment built entirely around outside eyes.

Results pointed to a plausible source. A fresh batch of 160 online observers, none told the real purpose, watched 75-second clips of the original volunteers at work and rated them on seven measures. Women were scored as more in control, better performing, more invested in the task, more alert, and happier, and were seen as liking the work more. Men landed lower on six of the seven measures, matching women only on how calm or stressed they appeared overall.

Those scores were not floating free of anything real. They tracked closely with how well each volunteer had done on the conversation task, while performance on the other four tasks showed no meaningful link to the ratings. In other words, the watchers keyed on the one thing that actually differed by sex, talking, and let it color their whole impression. Researchers point to the horn effect, also called the reverse halo effect, in which one visible shortcoming drags down the rating of everything else. Squeeze the volunteers harder, and the split grew wider still, with men judged to lose more control and show more strain than women as the timer sped up.

Stack those pieces together and a stereotype has a believable birthplace. Men are not measurably worse at the mechanical work of juggling chores, but they go quiet under load, observers read the silence as struggle, and the story that women handle it all better writes itself.

A Lab Test for ‘Men Are from Mars’

This study also puts a familiar piece of pop psychology under the microscope. John Gray’s 1990s bestseller argued that stressed men clam up and retreat inward. As the paper quotes him, “When a man is stressed he will withdraw into the cave of his mind,” growing “increasingly distant, forgetful, unresponsive, and preoccupied in his relationships.” Women, in Gray’s telling, do the opposite and talk their stress out.

That is a tidy anecdote, not evidence, and the Brunel team treated it as a question worth testing rather than a truth to accept. Their setup gave it a fair shot: a genuinely demanding, multi-part task with a running conversation layered on top. What they found lines up with Gray’s hunch on one narrow point. Under pressure, the men did engage less in conversation. But the grander framing collapses. Men showed no sign of becoming worse communicators, and on every hands-on measure they matched the women. Their withdrawal was specific and small, not a sweeping male retreat from the world.

Whether the same thing happens at a real dinner table, with real turn-taking rather than a speaker barking questions on a timer, the study cannot say. Its conversation task was a stand-in for the real thing. Even so, it is one of the few attempts to measure talking as an actual task inside a multitasking load, rather than sitting people at a computer and calling it everyday life.

Going Quiet Carried a Real Cost

This finding lands with a small sting for anyone who has felt unfairly judged while stretched thin. Men in the study were pulling their weight on the work that took hands and eyes. What sank their reputation was the part that took a voice. Reduced talk during a crunch might carry a real cost in the places it matters most, workplaces and control rooms where a silent operator can be misread as a failing one, or simply as rude. Less a sign that men and women differ in some deep way, the pattern shows how a few unanswered questions can rewrite how capable a person looks to everyone watching.

Pull the two studies together and a familiar piece of folk wisdom gets a quieter, more human explanation. Men and women handled the cooking, the searching, the counting, and the screen-watching at the same level, so the raw ability to juggle looks shared. What differed was the talking, and the talking was the one thing observers latched onto when they decided who was coping and who was drowning. A stereotype that has long been chalked up to some hardwired female advantage may rest instead on a much smaller foundation: which sex keeps the conversation going when the timer will not stop ringing.