A team of UK researchers recently compared the performances of 120 women and 120 men in a computer test involving switching between tasks of counting and shape recognition.

    Men and women were equally capable when tasks were handled one at a time. But when the tasks were mixed up, there was a clear difference. According to the paper published in the journal BMC Psychology, both women and men slowed down and made more mistakes as the switching became more rapid. But the men were slower, taking 77 percent longer to answer, whereas women took 69 percent longer.

    To make the experiment more relevant to day-to-day life, researchers tried a second test. A group of women and men were given eight minutes to complete a series of everyday tasks, such as finding restaurants on a map, doing simple math problems, answering a phone call, or deciding how they would search for a lost key in afield. Once again, women outperformed men in the test, particularly in the key-searching task.

    “It suggests that in a stressed and complex situation women are more able to stop and think about what's going on in front of them,” researcher Keith Laws of the University of Hertfordshire, UK, told BBC News. “In contrast, men had a slight impulsiveness（冲动）, answering without giving much thought to their responses.”

    So where do women get the ability to keep organized under pressure better than men? Researchers believe that it has its roots in evolution. In early human communities, women had to keep an eye on children while cooking meals. Meanwhile, men only needed to focus on hunting.