I'm curious about the whole gender difference multi-tasking thing; have been for a long time.
Firstly, most psychological studies aren't at all unbiased, in that the vast majority of participants are WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic). In fact, 2/3 of all studies are done on psychology undergraduates. Only 20% of these are male, and my experience of male psychology undergrads is that they are just a little weird (not the acronym).
Here's a couple of studies on multitasking that weren't done on undergrads.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/2050-7283/1/18My discussion points, based on 11 years teaching mostly girls (and therefore working with mostly female colleagues), and about 20 years teaching several multi-task things like offshore sailing, flying and diving.
Women can switch slightly more quickly between different simple tasks than men, especially when one or more of those involves talking/listening.
When one task takes a lot of attention, such as dealing with an awkward child, or a man overboard, women are no more capable of receiving extra inputs than men.
Given a number of tasks, men tend to choose to do them separately and sequentially slightly more often than women, and studies show that this is the most efficient approach for either gender. Basically, don't multitask if you don't have to.
Women are better at following several conversations, but conversations often have a lot of extraneous detail which can be ignored. If talk is information-rich, such as a briefing, women cannot multitask any better than men.
Men are supposed to be better at complex problem solving than women, so this affects things when one of the multitasks is difficult. However, I think this is a WEIRD artifact. You are not going to get thickos volunteering for studies, and there are a lot more male thickos than women -men have a significantly greater spread of IQs in the population than women. If studies do have a self-selecting IQ cut-off, this leaves the men in the study with a higher average IQ. Also, with more high IQ numbers, complex maths problems should be easy for more men. I have not noted any difference in complex problem solving when
equally clever men and women are tested.
Men are better at multitasking when several of those tasks involve spatial awareness. This is purely because men do have better spatial awareness, on average. When you put equally spatially-aware men and women together, there's no difference in my experience.
When tasking increases, if women have been talking they tend to keep talking, and performance suffers. If you shut them up, they actually perform better.
In summary, most multitasking differences are due to the nature of the tasks and known gender-differences with different types of task.
Women can do several simple tasks better than men, but not when one or more tasks becomes complex.
Men switch to single task concentration sooner than women as task (and tasking) difficulty increases, and this is a more efficient approach.
If you really remember all the specific vocabulary for the nuances, you can't possibly be that ignorant about the stuff itself!
