The Myth With Better PR Than It Deserves
Multitasking is the word of the decade—in job listings, lifestyle magazines, even shoe commercials with opinions about cognitive science. Every article on the subject eventually arrives at the same conclusion: women do it better, their brain hemispheres more densely connected, signals traveling faster, the whole mind firing at once. Men get one lane. Women get the full highway.
I’m not disputing the neuroscience. What I’m disputing is the way it gets deployed—selectively, conveniently, as ammunition in whatever argument is happening at the time. The same people who cite those studies will insist men are the better drivers, and somehow nobody ever reconciles these two portraits into a single coherent theory of human capability. Each claim gets pulled out when useful and pocketed when not.
What I actually know, from daily experience, is that I am bad at doing more than one thing at once—regardless of what my gender is supposed to grant me. Writing with the TV on means the writing suffers or the TV goes mute. Cooking while someone asks me something complicated means something burns. The oven beeps, the cursor blinks, and my brain just picks one. The other thing falls apart. This isn’t modesty. It’s just what happens.
Driving is where the generalizations really unravel. Parking failures are evenly distributed, in my observation. Roundabout anxiety doesn’t sort neatly by gender. What actually seems to predict driving confidence is embarrassingly simple: how much you drive. People who got their license and then spent years as passengers are the ones who hesitate and miscalculate. It’s practice, not wiring.
What would genuinely help—more than any study—is if people just said what they were bad at without framing it as a charming exception to their group’s supposed strengths. Not "I’m surprisingly good at this for a man" or "I’m bad at this, but most women are." Just: here’s a thing I can’t do yet. Full stop, no asterisk. A world where everyone owns their actual weaknesses instead of hiding behind demographic averages would be, frankly, a lot less annoying to live in.