Yes, on average women can perceive more colors than men [1]

Anecdotally, in high school we all took this test for a class [2] and the girls did a lot better than us. Although some guys were able to score pretty well on it. I don’t remember if this was the exact test but it’s very similar.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21675035/

[2] https://www.xrite.com/hue-test

As a dude who scores perfect on these color tests (this is my superpower), it’s funny on male-dominated places like here and reddit when people discuss logo color changes.

They’re always long threads of of very confident people saying how there isn’t even a difference and I’m like lol

Apparently my color perception is as good as I've always thought it was. I scored a 0 on that.

Oh, I’ve taken that test before. I’m a man, but I got a perfect score. I’ve always had a very easy time distinguishing shades and hues of color.

>[2] https://www.xrite.com/hue-test

" Best Score for your Gender -1000000 Worst Score for your Gender 1700045439

About your score: A lower score is better, with ZERO being a perfect score. The circle graph displays the regions of the color spectrum where your hue discrimination is low."

I hate this kind of stuff. WTF is that Best Score?

Hahaha:

> Best Score for your Gender -2147483648

> Worst Score for your Gender 2147483647

It goes from -2147483648 to 2147483647 for me, which I'm interpreting as "our langauge doesn't distinguish signed from unsigned integers, and nor do our developers". Possibly there's also some lack of validation of client-side data involved.

I wonder if there might be a language aspect to this, with males in the US generally having less familiarity with words for the in between colors leading to more difficulty distinguishing between them, with people with more words for greenish shades for example having an easier time seeing different shades of green.

https://boingboing.net/2011/08/12/how-language-affects-color...

I'd have to dig up references, but I understand it's a pretty well documented effect that having words for colors is directly related to a population seeing more distinction for those colors.

If I recall, some early societies didn't have a distinction between green and blue. Given that blue often doesnt show up naturally outside of the sky and it's reflections. And in those populations they would be much less sensitive to distinctions in blue-green.

Which is exactly what the article is about ;) (Well, one example of an early society that didn't distinguish between green a blue.)

For early societies, you might be thinking of the Greeks, though apparently it's somewhat common between languages?[1] For Greek the idea to originate from Homer's writings, with colors being more described in terms of how light or dark they are versus specific hues.[2]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine-dark_sea_(Homer)

Like many siblings, I'm male and got a perfect score as well. I don't think that I have perfect vision, but I'd rather assume the test is flawed.

It's pretty clear that it's "Based on the Farnsworth Munsell 100 Hue Test," and "this is not a replacement for the full test!" I think if you did particularly poorly on the online test then it's worth looking at whether you need to do the full test, as you might have colour blindness (or a terrible monitor). But a perfect score isn't super-meaningful.

Looking at this test on my monitors I would bet it's the 'terrible monitor' before color blindness by a longshot, one shows pretty good color the other is entirely washed out.

What's the scale is not clear. It says 0 is perfect but what about 5?

While comparing it shows typical scores as -(large number) to +(large number).

A lot of that is learned..

However, there are people who are tetrachromats, have cones most sensitive to a fourth frequency of light in their eyes, and those people are also overwhelmingly women.

If I recall correctly there has only been one human actually shown to have tetrachomacy, and the supposition that there are a exceedingly small number of additional ones. I think there was a mechanism proposed that would mean they were all biologically female, but can't remember details.

It certainly seems to be rare enough to have no practical impact (except to perhaps the tetrachromat, who presumably has different metatmers perception etc.)

> those people are also overwhelmingly women.

As far as I understand it takes having two X chromosomes with different versions of the gene that encodes the receptors for green, so only women can be tetrachromats.

I scored a 6, but their lack of data on the distribution of scores makes that pretty hard to interpret.

Does anybody know how to read that?

> https://www.xrite.com/hue-test

Fun test! I'd note for others, the quality of your screen can make a difference - I found one of the lines a lot easier on my phone (first try) than on my computer (second try) - though I got perfect both times.

Your score: 2

Best: segmentation fault (core dumped)

Maybe not more colors, but more easily distinguishes them: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/brain-babble/20150...

This is different from tetrachromacy, where some women really do see more colors: https://www.optimax.co.uk/blog/tetrachromacy-superhuman-visi...

The mothers of some red-green colorblind children are tetra chromatic, so they actually see more. I think hexa chromatic also exists.

Edit: somehow didn't notice you'd linked this.

I edited it in like under a minute afterwards, you may have opened the page right in the middle. I don't usually bother with an "Edit:" note if it's that fast.

> because I'm convinced my wife sees more colours than I do

A sizeable percentage of women have tetrachromy (5% ? I forgot the exact number but it's not nothing). AFAIR men do not have tetrachromy.

So, basically, some women do actually see more colours than all the men and than most other women.

Maybe your wife has tetrachromic vision? (not sure how it's called)