Dear colleagues,
I would like to ask a question upon request of my student:
“Hello everyone,
I am a student and I am doing a project on a very interesting topic: why men and women perceive colors differently. But I am having a lot of trouble finding information. In various sources, the material is not available or is very unclear to an average student.
The only things that I’ve found were the eye anatomy and a physiological explanation (Bimler, 2004) that genes determine the perception of colors thus women heterozygous for opsin genes see colors better than other women and men.
I will be very happy to get some help and get an explanation of this human feature.
Best regards,
Maria”
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227601246_Quantifying_Variations_in_Personal_Color_Spaces_Are_There_Sex_Differences_in_Color_Vision
found that the only sex-related difference in color vision is that males pay more attention to luminance changes while females place more emphasis on the red–green axis.(2008) found a substantial difference between sexes in red–green chromatic sensitivity, with males being more sensitive than females.
I think it is necessary to distinguish between perception and judgment. We judge what we perceive. Therefore, different judgments can result either from different perceptions or from different attitudes towards or different attention to perceived features.
In the cited 2004 study by Bimler et al. the subjects were asked to judge the (dis)similarity between colour pairs. It turned out (loosely said) that male subjects did not care so much whether one colour was more reddish or more greenish than the other. Rather than that their judgment was stronger influenced by differences in lightness. I have chosen this formulation to make it clear that men and women might well have seen exactly the same things, but valued them differently due to a gender, i.e. a cultural, bias.
The behaviour-related functions of lightness and chromaticness are different. Lightness informs us about the shape and form of objects (which makes black and white photography and television possible), but chromaticness informs us about the state of the objects, such as the ripeness of fruit. One could speculate whether the role of men and women in society, or their education, furthers a different strength of attention to certain colour attributes.
Of course the findings may still be caused by biological sex differences in colour perception, because it has been observed before that some women have photo receptors which sample the long and medium wave part of the light spectrum somewhat different from those of other people.
To understand what can be caused by such biological variations one must know how the subjective colour space is constructed from the receptor signals. I cannot go into details (frankly because I am not qualified), but roughly the sum of the signals from those two mentioned receptors informs us about lightness, and their difference informs us about redness or greenness (note that nothing can be red and green at the same time). Therefore, any difference in the receptors could also have had a role in the colour similarity judgments.
To sum up, the findings of Bimler et al. are interesting, but we cannot tell where they come from.
the only sex-related difference in color vision is that males pay more attention to luminance changes while females place more emphasis on the red–green axis.A substantial difference between sexes in red–green chromatic sensitivity, with males being more sensitive than females.
While there is a lot of debate regarding the issue, there have been studies (I forget the article name) which indicated that women possess more cones (or variety in the cones i.e. polymorphism, to be more specific) in their retina, thereby attributing to recognizing a wider colour spectrum. This has widely been attributed to the division of labour among our ancestors wherein, historically early-women being gatherer's needed to identify edible/ripe fruits whereas the men served as hunters and needed to spot movement. While I am not sure how credible these theories are, they do sound plausible.
Murray et.al's 2012 paper is an interesting read on the subject of male/female colour vision comparison... doi:https://doi.org/10.1167/12.1.18
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