Men and women apparently have different reactions to color. This I must admit rather surprises me. Still, who could not like a newspaper piece that quotes our own title?

Men and women differ in many ways, as we know all too well. Viva la difference? Absolutely.

Well, quite, we should indeed celebrate nature in all her many glorious ways, which of course includes the ways in which men and women do differ. The bit that surprises me is what follows though:

One of the ways we differ is in our preference of color. For example, a study by Guilford and Smith in 1959 revealed that men were more tolerant toward achromatic (colorless) atmospheres than women. With that in mind, Guilford and Smith deduced that women might be more color-conscious.

Hmm, I’m not really sure. Yes, of course, I’ll take a scientists word over my own observations or prejudices but I’m really not all that sure that women are indeed naturally more color conscious than men.

Well, since those two researchers got the ball rolling, McInnis and Shearer picked it up in 1964 and found that blue-green was more a favorite of women than of men. They also discovered that 57 percent of men and 76 percent of women preferred cool colors. The bright-color preference ran a close race, with 51 percent of men choosing bright colors and 45 percent of women opting for the brights.

In a study in 1990 by Radcloff, it was found that more women have a favorite color than men.

No, I’m really not sure. The rest of that piece is about domestic color schemes, which don’t really concern us here.

OK, so women obvservably, in our society, prefer lighter colors and pastel shades. More of them have a favourite color. However, is this something to do with anything innate in having the XX chromosome combination? Or XY? Or is it something more to do with our society?

Of course, to actually test this we need to have a look at some other society and see what they do: unfortunately, I cannot find any so we’ll have to argue by analogy.

Consider the way that we use pink and blue as markers for, respectively, girls and boys. Is there anything innate about this? No, most certainly not, it’s entirely a construct of our current American (and to some extent, Western European) society. There is no such connection between those two colors and the sexes in other cultures, Asian, African or whatever. So we absolutely know that the pink/blue thing is not innate, it’s purely a cultural preference handed down through the society.

Now I would be hesitant to start arguing that women’s greater sensitivity to color, as argued above, is necessarily the same as this, purely cultural. I can think of reasons to argue that it is innate: women in hunter gatherer societies do the gathering which could mean that ability to spot a berry or fruit would be an advantage. But I think the preponderance of the evidence (OK, perhaps my prejudices perhaps) is that it is a cultural matter. Women, whether rightly or wrongly, are brought up to pay more attention to clothes, to colors, the the home and hearth. It’s not so much that they are more sensitive to color, but that they are more sensitised.

Of course, as always, anyone who actually knows the answer is encouraged to tell me where I’m wrong.