"When you look at men and women in similar kinds of work situations they look very similar," Barbara Schneider, a professor of sociology at Michigan State University and a co-author of the study, said in an interview.
"But when they come home it is very clear that women are shouldering much more of the responsibilities of housework and childcare."
Schneider and Shira Offer, an assistant professor at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, used data from the 500 Family Study, which looked at how families in eight U.S. urban and suburban communities balance work and family life.
Their research, which is published in the American Sociological Review journal, is based on responses from a subset of 368 mothers and 241 fathers in dual-income families, which they said reflects the most time-pressured segment of the population.
"This (the findings) suggests that working mothers are doing two activities at once more than two-fifths of the time they are awake, while working fathers are multitasking more than a third of their waking hours," Schneider said.
In addition to doing more, the jobs women perform at the same time in the home are more labor intensive,
such as housework and childcare, than what men tackle.
The study showed that 52.7 percent of all multitasking for working mothers involved housework, compared to 42.2 percent for fathers, and 35.5 percent was taken up with childcare, as opposed to 27.9 percent for men.
"Fathers, by contrast, tend to engage in other types of activities when they multitask at home, such as talking to a third person or engaging in self-care. These are less burdensome experiences," Schneider explained.
Multitasking may feel productive, but psychological research suggests our brains aren't at their best when divided between two or more tasks. One 2010 study published in the journal Science found that the brain can juggle two tasks at once, but adding a third is a recipe for disaster. Even practiced multitaskers struggle with the overload. According to research by Stanford University professor Clifford Nass, the people who multitask the most are the worst at it.
But for modern families, multitasking is a way of life. Schneider and her colleagues wanted to know how much time moms and dads spend doing two or more things at once, and just as important, how they felt about it.
As part of a large 1999-2000 study of mostly middle-class families called the 500 Family Survey, researchers asked parents to wear pre-programmed wristwatches that would beep eight times each day. When the participants heard the beep, they stopped everything to record in a diary what they were doing, whom they were with, and their emotions at the moment. This method, called "experience sampling," was developed by Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
"What we're really learning is not only how people are spending their time, but how they're feeling about it at a very deep and personal level," Schneider said.
With a total sample of 16,878 diary entries of 368 moms and 9,482 entries of 241 dads, the researchers found that multitasking is very common. Fathers multitask for more than a third of their waking hours, while mothers multitask for two-fifths of their waking lives.
Paid work puts a lot of multitasking burden on both moms and dads, with work-related multitasking making up 36 percent of multitasking episodes for dads and 23.4 percent of multitasking episodes for moms. At home, however, mothers are more likely than fathers to engage in two housework activities or two child care-related activities at the same time, the study found. Housework and child care combos accounted for 10 percent of moms' multitasking time and only 4.4 percent for dads.
Modern family
Though moms piled on more multitasking at home than dads, they were also less cheery about it. They reported a lower sense of well-being when multitasking than did multitasking dads, Schneider said. Moms reported more negative emotions and more stress when they multitasked at home compared with when they did a single task, while fathers did not show this increase in negative emotions.
"Basically, that's telling you that when dads are at home and they multitask, they pretty much are thinking it's a good thing," Schneider said. "This is less so in the case of moms."
Some of the emotional discrepancy may have to do with who juggles what tasks. The study found that for working moms, 52.7 percent of multitasking episodes at home were housework-related, compared with 42.2 percent for working dads. Likewise, 35.5 percent of home multitasking for moms involves child care, compared with 27.9 percent for dads.
The results highlight the stress that middle-class families face in the modern work force, Schneider said.
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