It appears that women really are better at multitasking than men.

According to UK researchers, there is a widely accepted belief that women are better at multitasking, however there is ‘practically no scientific research on this topic'. They decided to investigate this further.

They designed two experiments to assess how people coped in a situation where they were faced with many tasks, but did not need to carry them all out at the same time.

The first experiment took place in a laboratory. It found that in general, everyone slowed down when they were asked to do more than one task. However, women did not slow down as much as men, indicating that they may be better in such situations.

The second experiment was designed to better reflect the need for multitasking in the real world. The participants were asked to complete three tasks in eight minutes - solving simple maths problems, searching for restaurants on a map and locating a lost key.

Furthermore, during this experiment, the phone would ring to further distract those taking part. If the person answered it, they would have to answer questions on general knowledge.

This experiment found little difference between the men and women when it came to solving the maths problems, locating restaurants and answering general knowledge questions.

However, the women were ‘significantly better at devising strategies for locating a lost key'.

"Using two very different experimental set ups, we found that women have an advantage over men in specific aspects of multitasking situations. The lack of other empirical studies, though, should caution against drawing strong conclusions. Instead, we hope that other researchers will aim to replicate and elaborate on our findings," the researchers said.

Details of these findings are published in the journal, BMC Psychology.