📄 social_science

Gender Differences in Multitasking and Stress Coping in the Workplace: An Experimental Study Using Brief COPE

This experimental study challenges gender stereotypes in workplace multitasking and stress coping by demonstrating that while men and women exhibit different performance patterns and coping strategies under stress, individual variability in coping profiles is more significant than gender-based differences, suggesting organizations should prioritize tailored stress management over gendered assumptions.

Original authors: Yan Ru Celeste Tan

Published 2026-06-30

📖 4 min read☕ Coffee break read

CC BY 4.0

Original authors: Yan Ru Celeste Tan

Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). ✨ This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer

The Big Picture: The "Multitasking Myth"

Imagine your brain is a single-lane road. When you try to do two things at once (like driving while texting), you aren't actually driving two cars; you are rapidly switching the traffic lights back and forth. This paper investigates a popular belief: that women are naturally better at this "traffic switching" than men, especially when things get stressful.

The researcher, Yan Ru Celeste Tan from King's College London, set up an experiment to see if this stereotype is true, or if the real secret lies in how people handle stress (their "coping strategies").

The Experiment: A Stressful Video Game

The study invited 115 working adults (about half men, half women) to play a computer game.

The Game: Participants had to sort shapes and patterns on a screen, switching between rules quickly.
The Twist: Half the players were put in a Low-Stress zone (relaxed, plenty of time). The other half were in a High-Stress zone (a ticking clock, a video of a moving hand, and messages telling them they were being judged and needed to be faster).
The Questionnaire: Afterward, everyone filled out a survey called the "Brief COPE" to see how they usually deal with tough situations (e.g., do they plan, do they pray, do they vent, or do they blame themselves?).

What They Found: Breaking the Stereotypes

1. The "Gender Gap" in Performance

The Stereotype: People often think women are the "Multitasking Masters."
The Reality: Under high stress, the results were a mixed bag, not a clear win for either side.
- Men tended to be faster and slightly better at keeping their accuracy relative to how fast they were going. Think of them as race car drivers who kept their speed up even when the track got bumpy.
- Women showed a slight improvement in absolute accuracy (getting the most answers right), acting more like careful navigators who slowed down just enough to ensure they didn't take a wrong turn.
The Takeaway: Neither gender was "better" overall. The stress just changed how they played the game (speed vs. precision).

2. The "Coping" Card

The Stereotype: Men are "Problem Solvers" (fix it), and women are "Emotional Processors" (talk it out).
The Reality: The survey showed some differences, but they weren't the classic ones.
- Men were more likely to admit to venting (letting off steam) and self-blame (beating themselves up).
- Women were more likely to use active coping (making a plan) and religious coping (turning to faith).
The Takeaway: While there were some differences, the study found that how you cope matters more than who you are.

3. The Real Hero: Your Coping Style
The most important finding wasn't about gender at all; it was about your "Coping Profile."

Imagine coping styles as survival kits.
People with "Maladaptive" kits (using denial, giving up, or blaming themselves) performed worse at the game. They were like hikers trying to climb a mountain with a broken compass.
People with "Adaptive" kits (planning, active problem-solving) performed better. They were the hikers with a working map.
Crucially: These "kits" didn't belong to just men or just women. Both genders had people with good kits and bad kits.

What This Means for the Workplace

The paper suggests that companies should stop trying to hire people based on gender stereotypes about multitasking.

Don't ask: "Is this a woman? She must be good at multitasking."
Do ask: "Does this person have a good stress-management toolkit?"

The study concludes that instead of looking for a specific type of person to handle chaos, organizations should build a better environment. This means helping everyone prioritize tasks one by one (sequential work) rather than forcing them to juggle everything at once, and teaching everyone how to build better "survival kits" for stress.

Summary in One Sentence

This study proves that under pressure, men and women handle multitasking differently but neither is superior; the real key to success isn't your gender, but whether you have a healthy way of dealing with stress.

Technical Summary: Gender Differences in Multitasking and Stress Coping in the Workplace

Problem Statement
Multitasking (MT), particularly sequential task-switching, is a pervasive feature of modern work environments but is associated with cognitive strain, reduced accuracy, and increased stress. While popular discourse often suggests women possess superior multitasking abilities, empirical findings remain inconsistent, with some studies showing female advantages in task-switching efficiency and others finding no differences or male advantages in specific spatial contexts. Crucially, existing research has rarely integrated stress-coping frameworks to explain performance variability under pressure. This study addresses the gap in understanding how gender and coping orientations interact to influence multitasking performance under experimentally induced stress, moving beyond demographic assumptions to examine psychological mechanisms.

Methodology
The study employed a between-subjects experimental design with 115 working adults (61 males, 54 females) recruited from the UK and US via Prolific. Participants were randomly assigned to either a low-stress or high-stress condition.

Task-Switching Paradigm: A modified version of Stoet et al.'s (2013) "Shape" and "Filling" task was administered using the Gorilla Experiment Builder. Participants classified visual stimuli (shape type and filling pattern) based on location cues.
- Low-Stress Condition: Participants received immediate feedback (thumbs-up/down) but advanced automatically after 3,000 ms regardless of accuracy.
- High-Stress Condition: The response window was reduced to 1,500 ms (time pressure), accompanied by a looping clock video and escalating on-screen messages emphasizing performance standards and social comparison to induce evaluative threat.
Measures:
- Performance Metrics: Reaction time (RT) and accuracy were calculated for mixing costs (difference between mixed-task and single-task blocks) and switch costs.
- Coping Strategies: The Brief COPE Inventory (Carver, 1997) was administered to assess 14 coping subscales, grouped into problem-focused, emotion-focused, and dysfunctional (maladaptive) styles.
- Manipulation Check: Perceived stress levels were self-reported on a 1–10 scale post-task.
Analysis: Data were analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics. Multivariate analyses of variance (MANOVAs) and two-way ANOVAs examined stress and gender interactions. Exploratory k-means cluster analysis was conducted to identify distinct coping profiles (adaptive, maladaptive, low).

Key Results

Stress Induction: The manipulation was successful; the high-stress group reported significantly higher perceived stress ( $M=5.92$ ) than the low-stress group ( $M=3.33$ ).
Gender × Stress Interaction in Performance:
- Under high stress, males demonstrated faster reaction times and better relative accuracy (smaller proportional mixing costs).
- Females showed slight improvements in absolute accuracy under high stress.
- Overall, stress did not uniformly impair performance but appeared to alter speed-accuracy trade-offs. Effects were modest ( $\eta^2 \approx .05$ ) and metric-dependent.
Gender Differences in Coping:
- Significant gender differences were found in specific coping strategies: males reported greater use of venting and self-blame, while females reported greater use of religious coping and active coping.
- No significant differences were found between genders regarding higher-order categories (problem-focused vs. emotion-focused), challenging the binary stereotype that men are purely problem-focused and women emotion-focused.
Coping Profiles and Performance:
- Cluster analysis identified three profiles: adaptive, maladaptive, and low coping.
- Participants with maladaptive coping profiles exhibited significantly poorer mixing cost accuracy compared to those with adaptive profiles.
- Crucially, these coping profiles did not differ significantly by gender or perceived stress level, suggesting that coping orientation is more individually variable than gender-determined.
Workplace Support: Both genders prioritized cognitive load-reducing supports (e.g., task prioritization, autonomy) over emotional wellbeing programs, with no significant gender differences in support preferences.

Key Contributions

Integration of Frameworks: The study bridges cognitive performance research (task-switching) with stress-coping theory in an occupational context, utilizing a working adult sample rather than students.
Refutation of Stereotypes: The findings challenge established gender stereotypes regarding multitasking superiority and coping styles. The data suggests that under stress, performance trade-offs are more closely linked to individual coping profiles (specifically maladaptive vs. adaptive) than to gender.
Contextual Nuance: The study highlights that stress effects on multitasking are not uniform; they depend on the specific performance metric (speed vs. accuracy) and the individual's coping orientation.

Significance and Claims
The paper concludes that organizational reliance on gender-based assumptions for multitasking ability is unreliable. Instead, the variability in performance under pressure is better explained by individual coping orientations. The authors claim that:

Coping is Individual: Coping behavior under stress is more individually variable than gender-determined.
Maladaptive Coping is Detrimental: Maladaptive coping strategies are directly associated with poorer multitasking efficiency (specifically mixing cost accuracy).
Organizational Implications: Organizations should move away from selecting for "multitasking capacity" or designing gender-targeted interventions. Instead, they should focus on reducing cognitive overload, supporting sequential task prioritization, and fostering flexible, individually tailored stress management strategies. The study posits that structured work design and cognitive load management are more impactful for sustainable performance than demographic-based selection criteria.