Women are innately fertile as well... except for the ones who aren't. I don't mean "every single woman on the planet can multitask well" or even "a given woman will multitask better than most men she knows." Just that the biology pushes that way... women who could not pay attention to small kids and accomplish household tasks at the same time, tended not to have kids that survived to adulthood.
A woman who can't nurse and eat at the same time is a good candidate for a family that's missing at least one member soon. (Or used to be; modern society has a lot of advantages that weren't around a few hundred years ago, much less several thousand.) And while nothing in that biological necessity requires the ability to hold conversation or balance a checkbook at the same time, she tends to develop those in self-defense, because "feed the baby-clean the baby-feed self-clean self-repeat" gets mind-numbingly boring quickly. And since those weren't optional tasks, the choice was "do several things at once, or spend several years without intelligible conversation."
Men's inability to multitask was not as directly discouraged. Or at least, didn't quickly result in the end of that genetic track.
Okay, I think we're arguing over connotations. To me, "innately" in this context implies "without exception"; I wouldn't have said it that way, but I'm having a problem articulating how I would say it. "More likely than men to be strong multitaskers", perhaps? That does square with my observations -- most of the people I know who are amazingly skilled at multitasking are indeed female.
Seems to be a bit stronger than a mere frequency statement.
I think elfwreck is saying that there are underlying reasons for women to be able to multitask that don't apply to men. Of course, just because you can create a Darwinian story why a trait should be inherent doesn't mean it is. ;-)
A woman who can't nurse and eat at the same time is a good candidate for a family that's missing at least one member soon. (Or used to be; modern society has a lot of advantages that weren't around a few hundred years ago, much less several thousand.) And while nothing in that biological necessity requires the ability to hold conversation or balance a checkbook at the same time, she tends to develop those in self-defense, because "feed the baby-clean the baby-feed self-clean self-repeat" gets mind-numbingly boring quickly. And since those weren't optional tasks, the choice was "do several things at once, or spend several years without intelligible conversation."
Men's inability to multitask was not as directly discouraged. Or at least, didn't quickly result in the end of that genetic track.
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I think elfwreck is saying that there are underlying reasons for women to be able to multitask that don't apply to men. Of course, just because you can create a Darwinian story why a trait should be inherent doesn't mean it is. ;-)
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