Color is everywhere; gender is everywhere; color and gender have a varied, changing, and hard-to-pin-down relationship, which nevertheless creates powerful, explicit and implicit signals by and for both the people who apply colors (to their kids, themselves, their cars) and those who see them (including themselves).
Naming and choosing colors has a subjective component, as Randall Munroe showed in his xkcd color survey.
I’ve written a few posts about gender and color, and conducted a simple “what’s your favorite color?” survey, which turned up these results for the first 1,695 respondents, the vast majority from a university-sponsored email blast to faculty, staff and students:
(The survey is still up if you want to take it – click the picture – but I’ve already pulled out a sample for analyzing.) I labeled these colors blue, green, orange, yellow, red, purple and pink, but also showed the colors on the screen to try to triangulate visual and verbal definitions. Still, a few people added comments such as, “I usually like green, but not this one.”
In the old days, some surveys have simply asked people to name their favorite colors. Silver and colleagues (Perceptual and Motor Skills 1988, 66:295-99) used that method in 1988 in a survey of undergraduates, and got these results:
“Others” included pink, which for some reason they didn’t list separately, even though it was about half the “others” in the case of women. Ironically, Black and White appear as colors on the row labels, and as races on the column labels. (I didn’t include those in my survey, because when I was a kid some other kid told me they weren’t really colors. Now I capitalize them when referring to races, since those definitely aren’t really colors.)
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