Sex Differences in Colour Preference

What it is

The best-known laboratory test is a short letter by Anya Hurlbert and Yazhu Ling in Current Biology in 2007, titled "Biological components of sex differences in color preference". Press reports of the study give the sample as 208 volunteers aged 20 to 26, 171 of them British and 37 recent arrivals from mainland China. Each volunteer chose, as fast as they could, between pairs of coloured rectangles on a screen. The authors did not rank colours by name. They summarised each person's choices as two weights, one on the blue-yellow dimension of human colour vision and one on the red-green dimension, the two dimensions along which the visual system codes colour.

Both sexes leaned towards blue. Women leaned further than men towards the red end of the red-green dimension, which moved their preferences towards pinks and lilacs. The Chinese volunteers differed in the same direction, and both Chinese men and women preferred red more than the British group did. The authors suggested an evolutionary reading, that women who were good at spotting ripe red fruit may have been favoured during early humans' foraging, and that culture could amplify the tendency. Hurlbert described her account of why blue is liked as speculation, and the team said it planned to test infants to separate nature from nurture.

The letter's abstract, read at Newcastle University's repository, states the method and reports a consistent sex difference in the colour-dimension weights across cultures, without sample counts. The paper's tables were not read for this page. The sample sizes and the blue finding above come from press summaries of the letter, and those summaries give no effect sizes. The bibliographic record was confirmed through Newcastle University's repository and Crossref.

A second kind of evidence asks people to name a favourite colour. A third asks young children to pick between objects that differ only in colour. These three instruments measure different things, and the literature on this question is mostly a record of what happens when they are mixed up. The page on gender-typed colour preference covers the third.

In effect

The 2007 pattern did not repeat in a later comparison. In 2015 a psychologist at King Saud University in Riyadh, Abdulrahman Al-Rasheed, published a replication in Frontiers in Psychology using the same style of analysis with Saudi and English participants. The stimuli were eight hues at one fixed lightness and one fixed saturation, shown on a calibrated monitor against a grey background in a dark room, in 56 paired trials. All participants had normal red-green colour vision, screened with Ishihara plates. The samples were small, reported as 71 Saudi and 38 English participants.

The male curves looked alike across the two countries and peaked in blue-green. The female curves differed by country. Saudi women peaked in the red-pink region, and English women peaked nearer purple and blue-green. The abstract puts the contrast in one sentence: "Arabic and English preference curves were found to differ, yet there was greater similarity for Arabic and English males than Arabic and English females." The author concluded that the proposed universal, evolutionarily driven sex difference in red-green weighting "is not supported", and that colour preference varies with both sex and culture.

Named favourites give a third picture. In a 2019 paper in Sex Roles, titled "Pink for girls, red for boys, and blue for both genders", Domicele Jonauskaite and colleagues asked Swiss participants to choose a favourite colour from an unrestricted set. Among 129 children aged 10 to 14, girls chose pink or purple more often than boys, boys chose red more often than girls, and blue was the commonest favourite for both. Among 180 adults aged 17 to 48, almost nobody of either sex chose pink, women were more likely than men to favour red, and blue stayed common. In a further study of 183 participants, pink was linked with positive emotions as much as blue and red were, women linked more positive emotions to pink than men did, and the emotions did not fully explain the differences in liking. The authors tie the pattern to gender stereotypes and to differences in status between women and men.

The common thread is that culture moves the curves. The best general account of why is ecological valence, proposed by Stephen Palmer and Karen Schloss in 2010: a colour is liked to the degree that the things it is attached to are liked. In a 2011 study led by Schloss, 57 Berkeley and 46 Stanford students rated 40 colours, and each group rated its own university's colours above its rival's, with the gap widening as self-rated school spirit rose. Group membership can shift liking in adults without any change in the colour.

What it does not say

It does not say that women innately prefer red or pink. The 2007 letter reports a lean towards red along one dimension in two groups of young adults, and the evolutionary account of it is the authors' own speculation, not a tested result. The 2015 comparison found that the sex pattern changed with country, which a universal biological account would not predict. Toddlers show no sex difference in pink or blue before about two, which sits more easily with learning than with an inborn liking for pink, though the child studies do not by themselves exclude a biological contribution to red.

It does not say the lab differences are large. The press accounts of the 2007 study give no effect sizes, and the samples in the comparison were small, so no size can be read from them here. The one large effect in this literature, in toddlers near their third birthday, concerns pink and blue at an age when preferences are still unstable.

It does not say the Swiss results are general. All three Swiss studies drew on one country, and the favourite-colour task measures what people choose to name, not what they would choose between two patches on a screen.

It does not license sorting products or rooms by sex. The findings differ by age, country and method, and the one robust regularity across them is that blue is liked by nearly everyone.

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