Randall Munroe is Western society’s preeminent geek. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates may be the big names in the Hollywood pantheon of geek world, but they each lost their street cred long ago (Windows Vista and the iPad didn’t do much to help, either). Randall Munroe, though, he is the new gold standard of geek chic. He worked at NASA. On robots! He does a webcomic. Mostly about math and physics jokes! For April Fools, he rebuilt his webpage as a fully-functioning unix terminal!
In another further attempt at the quest for knowledge (a never-ending journey for the true geek), Munroe conducted a survey last week to determine how men and women identify colors differently. The results, while somewhat predictable, are nevertheless shocking and thought-provoking.
As seen here, apparently men only have one “green” and no “hot pink,” women don’t perceive “salmon,” but both see the same “teal” and “magenta,” have no problem discerning “orange” from “yellow,” and identify the same periwinkle shade of pink-purple inexplicably as “blue.” Does this mean that women see more colors than men? No. That they just don’t care as much? Probably.
As with all good surveys, Munroe learned a lot of little things that he did not expect. For example:
Color names most disproportionately popular among women:
- Dusty Teal
- Blush Pink
- Dusty Lavender
- Butter Yellow
- Dusky Rose
Color names most disproportionately popular among men:
- Penis
- Gay
- WTF
- Dunno
- Baige
Yes, the men couldn’t even spell “beige” properly.
There’s a lot more to this very interesting study, such as the relationship between spelling “fuchsia” and matching a computer’s values of the color and the fact that, invariably, one person in your study will fill in the same racial slur over two-thousand times.
Overall, yes, the study shows that men just don’t identify color as widely as women do, which is curious considering fields like fine art, film-making and interior decorating – fields that thrive on the recognition of color – are still largely dominated by men. Maybe those men are just super-men, and that’s what allows them to dominate. Maybe women just have more spare time to analyze the minute differences between chromatic tones (I doubt it). Whatever the case, I wouldn’t be surprised if this informal study led to some very serious questions in the coming years.
