Women overanalyze, men oversimplify
January 26, 2011 § 3 Comments
Colors, that is. It might be true biologically that men and women perceive the same colors visually. The way they name them, though? Well that’s another (gender? sociological?) story. The chart below, by Stephen Von Worley, shows how differently men and women process and name colors. On his website, Data Pointed, there is an interactive version of the chart.
The chart includes vertical color zones (each “column” contains the same color variations). The larger the bubble, the more common the name used (i.e. “blue”, “red”). It also includes two large horizontal zones: the top contains names that women chose to describe colors, and the bottom names selected by men.
As can be seen, and as we all suspected, women overanalyze colors, whereas men oversimplify them.
Take the color pink, for example. Women name color variations such as: “salmon”, “neon pink”, “light mauve”, “bubblegum pink”, “baby pink”, “hot pink”, “fuschia” and “pepto bismol”.
Whereas for men life is simpler: there is “magenta”, “pink” and my favorite semantic concoction, “pinkish”.
Further proof that inter-gender communication can be a drag…
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