And yet men will not be able to tell the difference. I have a flat with white painted walls, or so I thought... until a woman told me they were cream, milk and eggshell :-/
Not to get me started on the millions of colours you paint your walls in. I did have a laugh when I found out that proprietary paint colours are a big thing, a few weeks after reading on HN about Adobe "cancelling" a colour. Proprietary colours are a thing I can suddenly talk about with repair guys. Car paints are proprietary. Kitchen panel paints are proprietary. It's a whole new world. It's not just RGB, there's gloss and sparkle to consider.
Often what many think of as white is white mixed with blue. This is super evident after properly calibrating the white point of a (good) TV. Most casual viewers will say that the whites are now yellow/orange but in reality they are just used to always looking at white with a lot of blue mixed in.
I've had similar experience with a interior designer friend of mine who told me my new white walls were not white but cream. I have a spectrophotometer that pretty clearly said that my walls were closer to white then his walls that he insisted were proper white (they were white mixed with blue)
"White" is tricky, because it's dependent on color temperature of the light which is illuminating the given surface. If someone is used to viewing white objects under daylight, but you're calibrating their TV to match the color temperature of their indoor environment (which proper calibration should do), then the "white" displayed on their TV will be a fundamentally different color from the "white" they see reflected off a white surface outside.
This effect is going to be found to be doubly true if you're calibrating to indoor lighting in the evening, but they watch their TV at noon in the daylight with the windows open -- because the color temperature of the environment will now be much higher than the color temperature of the screen.
A but of orange will make white look more like white does in the evening, or in firelight.
Color is a perceptual phenomenon that is not independent of surroundings and is especially tricky when you're talking about emission. Just as a piece of white paper in a candle-lit room is very different to a piece of white paper outdoors in sunlight, what is perceived as white on a TV can differ greatly depending on the room it is in or even what else is displayed on-screen.
Rather than insulting people's conception of what "proper white" is, perhaps consider that it's not quite as simple as you think.
Most content is mastered for this 6500K as that is what the D65 standard is and the tv/film standards like Rec709 and Rec2020 use D65.
We pick an arbitrary threshold of diminished color information and call that CVD, color vision deficiency. Depending on which threshold you pick for CVD, males are anywhere from 10 to 20 to 50 _times_ more likely to have it than females. Of course, this “has / does not have CVD” binary is an artifact of us picking a threshold; the real underlying mechanism is that the distribution of wavelength tunings in the male population is much more heavily weighted towards “overlapping”.
Put another way, you have two overlapping bell curves of “how much color information can your eye cells theoretically generate” and if you drop a single point on that graph you can capture 1% of females and 10% of males to the left of it (for that 10x figure), or 0.02% of females and 1% of males to the left of the chosen point (for that 50x figure), or anywhere in between. And the fact that you can do this tells us the two bell curves very likely have different means and standard deviations.
The search term is “spectral sensitivity” if you’re interested in finding out more.
(I do know that “but it’s true” isn’t considered to be a good rebuttal to “it’s a stereotype”, but it kinda seems like it should be, and I don’t really know why it isn’t. Also, as someone with extreme CVD, color vision is just a fantastically interesting topic regardless of sex differences. The way those EnChroma glasses that “treat” color vision deficiency work is they block out a small section of the light wavelengths where CVD tends to have high overlap. This artificially increases the relative difference in activation, meaning the brain can extract more color data, with the practical result that people with CVD put on these glasses and see colors with an intensity they’ve never seen before. But it gets even cooler! For instance, did you know if we develop the technology to directly stimulate those different wavelength receptors independently of each other, we can make those receptors report “differences in relative activation” that are literally impossible to achieve with any combination of light wavelengths? That is, the cells will happily report perfectly well-formed color data to the brain, except that it’s data in a range that no brain has ever received before. The visual cortex seems like it does fairly general information processing, at least at the lower levels before we start tagging that information with e.g. emotional responses or linguistic names, so on some level our brain would probably be able to make immediate sense of this previously “out of band” information. It must be able to do so, or else CVD sufferers wouldn’t get such vivid reactions to EnChroma glasses. So it’s very plausible that this procedure would instantly unlock actual “new color experiences” for everyone. How cool is that?)
For instance, "Jewish people are good with money" is a social construct, caused by the Catholics banning their adherants from working in banks for centuries. There's no inherent difference between groups as far as being able to do the job. It's the result of centuries of social distortions applied to who can do what job. If the social distortions (which still happen today, often propagated by the stereotype itself) ended, the difference would cease to exist.
It's important to distinguish the difference between intrinsic differences and socially-constructed differences. And we keep discovering more differences are socially constructed than we had previously thought. Even the idea that men are worse at color perception has a significant social component. That's what the OP was referring to - the social construct caused by telling children that caring about color distinctions isn't a masculine trait. Sure, there's also an intrinsic difference, with color perception having a sex-linked genetic component. That is real. But it's not the entire story, and I'd be wary of making blanket statements that assume the intrinsic property is the only one.
My complaint was with the way it was said, it looks immature and promoting stereotypes about color perception in daily life.
With the exception of color blindness, the difference in perception between women and men is much smaller than the variation across all humans. There are many things where we can measure a difference that is "significant" but in reality, insignificant (IE, passes a t-test with bonferroni or other multiple tests correction, but doesn't matter in any way at all during life).
Much more interesting than "seeing"/"perceiving" colors that most humans don't (example: tetrachromancy) is seeing polarization. I can see polarization but it was self-taught (see the page on Haidinger's brush and then go outside and look at the sky with polarized glasses on/off.... after a bit, you will realize you actualyl can "see" the polarization.
Of course, there's plenty of research[1] showing women are better at color discrimination than men.
0. https://ec.europa.eu/research-and-innovation/en/horizon-maga...
1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21675035/#:~:text=Color%20wi....
Maybe gutting art programs in American public schools was a bad idea.
> Abramov explained in a statement these elements of vision are linked to specific sets of thalamic neurons in the brain's primary visual cortex. The development of these neurons is controlled by male sex hormones called androgens when the embryo is developing into a fetus.
A reminder that you’re allowed to care about whatever you want.
Is this something you (or people you're familiar with) believe? Never encountered this norm before.
As an architect, I can confirm that there are many men who know the difference between cream/milk/eggshell!
So any particular man may see color as well as any particular woman, but if you had to pick one person at random to save the world in the galactic color identification game show, you’d best pick a woman.