Next year marks the 20 year anniversary of my first involvement in an equality project. This was in a large insurance company and I was the only male in the project group.
My first question to the women was “Why equality? Why should our owners care about equality?” Ten minutes later the group had calmed down from what some perceived as an act of aggression on my part. A good discussion followed. They said the company would prosper from mixing men and women because men and women bring different qualities to the table. Still, 20 years later, I feel that was a pretty good response, even though they probably would want to alter it today.
When I asked “HOW does the competence of men and women differ” the response was quick and certain: “Multi tasking ability”. Earlier ideas about women being inferior in math and superior in language skills were unanimously discarded as prejudices, but on the issue of multi tasking there was no doubt. Back in 1992 everyone was simply certain of this and most people could cite several examples among their close relatives, colleagues and friends.
A couple of weeks ago me and my colleagues in Brilliant had a one day course in personal effectiveness held by Breitholtz Söderström from TimeFinder. Part of that course was a test of how much effectiveness we lose by attempting to multi task. I asked my colleagues to send their results to me. The result: Dead even! Men and women were equally poor at multi tasking. This is also what a clear majority of the research in this area says.
Believing in this myth could mean loss of effectiveness for women. That would decrease their chances of reaching top jobs and thereby decrease equality. That is bad for all of us, because our research shows that we are all happier in evenly mixed groups.