Color, Sex & Evolution

I was at a party and a friend and I were jokingly arguing about whether our solo cups were purple or pink, and drunkenly asking around others what they thought. A guy friend told us, on a tangent, that women ("[those] born as women") discern more colors than men ("[those] born as men") because back then they had the job of picking berries and had to discern between which berries were nutritious or dangerous. I didn’t think that sounded right when I was drunk. Now that I’m sober, I really don’t think that sounds right.

So, let’s review the idea: do (specifically cis, apparently) women have a physiological advantage over (specifically cis, apparently) men in discerning color because of an evolutionary development? With the current political climate, the answer to this question might have interesting implications as far as whether gendered traits are evolutionary or socially developed.

The Facts

Nidhi Jaint et al. published a paper in 2010, “Gender based alteration in color perception” (Indian J Physiol Pharmacol 54(4): 366-70), where they compared the abilities of 30 women and 30 men to match color strips with different shades on a chart. They found that the women were better at matching colors and also did so more quickly than the men did, especially with shades of red and green. That’s pretty straightforward and, honestly, aligns with our cultural expectations.

A similar study was published by Helene J. Haddad et al. earlier in 2009, “Does gender and experience influence shade matching quality?” (Journal of dentistry 37). Rather than just comparing women and men, the study also compares different levels of experience in dentistry: “305 females and 309 males, 319 dental students and 295 dental professionals” for a total of 614 participants. They found that dental experience was not a statistically significant, but gender was.

So far, this all checks out: women are better at discerning between different colors than men. The real question is whether this difference is physiological or social.

Color as Visual Light

Color is how humans perceive and describe different frequencies on the visual light spectrum (which itself is a subrange of the electromagnetic spectrum which includes non-visual energy). Humans have three ‘cones’ in our eyes which measure the quantity of light of different frequencies: our blue cones measure light around 450 nm, our green cones measure light around 540 nm, and our red cones measure light around 570 nm. This means that our vision is based on combining red, green, and blue ‘signals’ of different strengths in order to perceive different combinations of visual light (similar to how computer displays use red, green, and blue to define colors of individual pixels). An analogy to this might be having three radios, each one set to a different frequency to listen to different radio stations. As it were, other animals have more or less radios to listen to visual light: dogs only have two cones (apparently yellow and blue), while mantis shrimp have twelve different cones.

When we as humans assign different words to different colors, we are really assigning words to different combinations of perceivable light. Let’s go back to hex codes for color: red is #FF0000 (100% red), green is #00FF00 (100% green), and blue is #0000FF (100% blue). Yellow is just a combination of red and green signals to which we’ve assigned the name “yellow”, like #FFFF00 (100% red and 100% green). To get orange, you have to get less green in order to have relatively more red, like #FFA500 (100% red and 64% green). There are 256³ (about 17 million) different possible hex codes for that many different colors. Imagine how many more colors could be defined if we could rate each signal from 1 to 1000 instead of just to 255! Then, imagine how relatively few natural-language words we have to describe so many colors.

Before we continue, I wanted to indicate that the idea of primary colors in art (red, yellow, blue) is a different scheme than what humans use in their eyes (red, green blue). The RYB scheme is based on combining dyes or paints in order to create colors, whereas the RGB scheme is based on which signals our brain receives from our eyes like we’ve just seen. That’s all!

Color & Language

Humans only receive three kinds of color ‘signals’ at different strengths, but in doing so our brains can visualize all kinds of different colors. This means that two able viewers (i.e. without color blindness or other disabilities) perceive the same visuals and colors. However, just because we can see all kinds of color signals does not mean that we categorize them the same way. The difference between #FF0000 and #FE0000 is very slight, a difference of 1/255 in red signal, but we might call both of them shades of red—if you can tell the difference between them at all. This means that when we talk about assigning words to different colors, we are not in the realm of electromagnetism but in that of linguistics.

Cultures assign words to different colors when the difference between those colors is socially significant. One famous example you might have heard before is how the ancient Greek poet Homer refers to the Aegean Sea as “wine-dark”. This is because, back then, they did not have a word specifically descriptive of (dark) blue. The sea is just as dark as wine, which we might describe as dark purple (a combination of red and blue), but that’s a specific word or meaning which Homer did not have. A more modern example is that in Japan, the word ao used to mean both green and blue; over time, however, it began to just mean blue. The result was that they replaced their green traffic lights with blue ones, since people weren’t going to stop calling them ao lights.

Kevin Loria has a great 2015 article about the historical development of words to describe different colors, “No one could describe the color ‘blue’ until modern times” (Business Insider, 2015-02-27). The philologist Lazarus Geiger studied the emergence of different words for colors in various languages, found that words for light and dark developed prior to any other visual descriptors; then comes red; then comes green; and only much later, in every case he considered, does a word for “blue” show up. Red and green are much more pertinent to human society, and also occur more frequently in nature. Blue, meanwhile, is kind of an afterthought: the sky might as well just be white or light, and the sea might as well be green or wine-colored. The linguist Guy Deutscher anecdotally raised his child without describing to her the color of the sky, so he could ask what color she thought it was. She described it as colorless, then white, and then only eventually as blue. I think this is especially interesting because of Jaint’s 2010 study, where women distinguish best between different shades of red and green; not blue!

Loria also cites a study on the Himba culture in Namibia, which does not have different words for green and blue. When shown a selection of squares, one blue and the rest green, most could not pick out which square was different (or took a while to do so). Afterward, however, when shown a selection of all green squares with one being a slightly different shade, they were able to quickly point out which square was slightly different—probably related to how they have multiple words for different shades of green. So it seems that a culture’s environment and social organization vastly informs the words they use to describe colors and differentiate between them, going as far as to impact their perception of the color signals thus described.

Therefore, if women tend to discern more colors than men, it’s more likely that this difference is one of socialization than one of physiology (i.e. of an evolutionary, biological development). Is this rooted in a historical gendered division of labor or is it a more modern development?

Sex & Labor

Fuck! We’re deep in it now. You got your Engels? Your Irigaray? Your Graeber? I don’t know who else. I’m 23 years young. More importantly, though, I’m fucking with you. This is a blog post. I pulled citations out for the earlier stuff in this, but I’m tired of writing this now so all you’re gonna get from me is mixed anecdotes from reading different authors and mushing them together in my head. Delicious!

The gendered division of labor is a social development in humans that does not exist the same way in different animals. Moreover, the ways in which it emerges differs between ecosystems resulting from different lifestyles. It is not a given that every human population should have a gendered division of labor; in fact, we know that many pre-societal peoples do not have a gendered division of labor,¹ meaning that it is more likely for gendered division of labor to have emerged convergently (maybe with the development of family groups in a more organized social context) rather than in one ancestral population. Patriarchy is an even more developed form of the gendered division of labor which relies on the exchange of women between men, and thus (it seems) on a cultural notion of private property. This means that gendered roles and economy have a dialectical relationship, informing and shaping each other (as well as by other factors), but there is not a single teleology of how either emerges in different contexts. Both vary historically and geographically, and neither have an essential basis in human nature.

Edit: A new study on gendered division of labor in hunter-gatherer populations came out in June 2023; here’s an article about it!

If women today are better able to discern colors because of a past state (i.e. being berry-gatherers), that implies a social and linguistic continuity between the women of today and a common ancestral group of women from the past if a biological advantage is not responsible (which, more likely than not, it isn’t). The experiences of our hypothetical berry-picking grandmothers are far removed from those of modern (western) women, by thousands of years. That’s not just a long length of time, but a wide range of social contexts and transformations—especially in which women are never part of just one economic class but many, each with different living experiences and interests. Along these lines, I think it’s unlikely that women today should be better at discerning colors because of their hypothetical ancestors thousands of years ago (or that one can speak broadly about the history and condition of women in general, when there are so many experiences of womanhood past and present due to class, race, etc.).

I think that a more likely ‘culprit’ is modern consumer culture as directed towards a female base. In particular, I think that the makeup, fashion, and design industries—being not just heavily marketed towards women, but transformed into social obligations for them—are responsible for women acquiring a greater degree of color literacy. Women, especially of the higher classes, may have worn makeup throughout history, but only more recently (and maybe only in particular social contexts, e.g. in developed countries) are women in general expected to wear makeup. Many of the colors available are indeed derived from berries and flowers, different shades of red or pink being common; however, I think it’s only in a sufficiently developed economy that such a variety is available, not just of cosmetic colors but also of vegetation itself. This is anecdotal, but I also think that women’s ability to discern colors tends to be brought up in an aesthetic context, less so in a functional one. Maybe this is reductive, since there are certainly other present and historical factors at play, but this seems much more realistic and ‘bound’ to me than attributing color literacy in women to a hypothetical bygone gatherer culture whose effects are still felt today.

Conclusion

Overall, I think what distressed me about the conversation was that, although the factual premise is like completely true and to be expected, the rationalization was super essentialist. I think he could tell that by how he was trying to specify “men born as men” and “women born as women”, but that doesn’t help and the implications are still messy with regards to sex and physiology. We should think more carefully about what we take for granted between women and men, since so much of how we talk about gender tries to encode social reality into biological myth. That’s just how patriarchy works.

What’s funny, though, is that after all that: a cis gay guy came up to us and said he thought the cup was more like a fuchsia.

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1. I have to define this, I guess: society here means a population where not everyone knows everyone else, and yet they are all integrated in an economic and cultural system. This requires a high degree of social organization and abstraction since, again, it relies on coordinating work between people who might not even interact with each other directly. ↩︎