Color identification...Men vs Women

[kenny]

Hahaha!
I love this kind of stuff.
Sure it's stereotyping and generalizing, but so what.
Men and women being equal does not erase our differences ... generally.

BTW, women pale in comparison to some gay men on some of these kinds of things.
I had an interior decorator friend and you should have heard him describe colors.

 

[DoctorD]

I don't know, Ksinger, the concluding summary paragraph of the first article seems to agree with my point of view:

"If you're not dealing with the absolute sensitivity for color detection but the way in which colors are judged—such as the ability to describe a color, or what that color means, and so on," he said, "I'd say that females are definitely much better than males."

 

[ksinger]

Well, I could find nothing anywhere that supported that statement by that researcher. Not that being unable to find something on the web is proof of anything mind you. However, I was able to find lots of things like this:

But when the researchers tested color vision in one of two ways—by projecting colors onto frosted glass or beaming them into their subjects’ eyes— women proved slightly better at discriminating among subtle gradations in the middle of the color spectrum, where yellow and green reside. They detected tiny differences between yellows that looked the same to men. The researchers also found that men require a slightly longer wavelength to see the same hue as women; an object that women experience as orange will look slightly more yellowish to men, while green will look more blue-green to men. This last part doesn’t confer an advantage on either sex, but it does demonstrate, Abramov says, that “the nervous system that deals with color cannot be wired in the exact same way in males as in females.” He believes the answer lies in testosterone and other androgens. Evidence from animal studies suggests that male sex hormones can alter development in the visual cortex.

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Where-Men-See-White-Women-See-Ecru-192104511.html#ixzz2QcfLIbGX

So absolute sensitivity aside (and I'm unsure of what that means - does it mean absolute in terms of overall range, or to spectrum - the statement is very unclear), it seems women and men are NOT seeing the same colors at certain points in the spectrum, and that women do discriminate more colors.

If you want to believe that our ability to name colors is socially driven by makeup application rather than simply because we see more color distinctions, that's your right. I just disagree on that point.

 

[KaeKae]

Interesting thread. It kind of explains some conversations I've had with my husband, brother and father over the years. I swear my father knew two colors: blue and not-blue. He wasn't actually color blind, he just liked blue over any other color, so if there was a choice, he always chose blue. And, of course, there were only two ways to think or do something; his way and the wrong way, so every room in the house was blue, unless my mother just didn't ask his opinion, which definitely did happen!

More recently, I've had the debate with DH about the color of our house. It's a dull gray that I've wanted to paint since we moved in six years ago. For five of those six years, he insisted the house is white. I had to hold a piece of paper up to the side of the house to prove that it's not white. I'm now looking at colors because we will finally be painting soon. I can tell you this much, the house will definitely be Not-Gray, and he won't have anything to do with the choice, unless it's to agree with my (and our daughters.)