differenceblog, posts by tag: pink - LiveJournal

Cancers are the leading cause of death for women in the U.S. aged 35-64 (CDC 2004), and breast cancer is the second most common kind of cancer for women (WebMD). Blogger Susan Metters (2007) complains that the "pinking" of breast cancer excludes men, who can also develop breast cancer. Men make up less than 1% of all breast cancer diagnoses, according to the National Cancer Institute (2007).

However, many cases of male breast cancer can be linked to abnormal estrogen levels. Giordano et al (2002) found that male breast cancers were more often responsive to hormone treatments than breast cancer in women. In a report released today, the National Cancer Institute (2007) suggests that female breast cancer may be related to hormonal issues as well: the report attributes a recent drop in breast cancer rates to decreased use of hormone replacement post-menopause.

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October has been National Breast Cancer Awareness Month since 1985, and I am surrounded by pink. I was lost in a sea of pink on the subway yesterday as a crowd left the Making Strides walk. I was baffled by Gatorade's Pink Towels on the NFL sidelines. I don't object to the "pinking" of breast cancer because it excludes men. I object to the color coding of causes, because it trivializes the cause and encourages superficial "support" without understanding. The Personalized Cause site lets you pick a cause by your favorite colors -- don't support a cause that clashes. I also object to the gendering of colors, but I feel like that battle's lost. I'll continue to voice the opinion that a genetic female predisposition towards pink is unsubstantiated and ridiculous", but as a social convention, it appears to have won.

Steve Connor (UK Independent) is only one of dozens of reporters this week misreporting the results of Hurlbert and Ling's (2007) study on sex differences in color preferences. The authors state in the abstract that "there is no conclusive evidence for the existence of sex differences in color preference." While they did find that more male college students preferred blues while female college students preferred reds, they also admit that "while these differences may be innate, they may also be modulated by cultural context or individual experience" -- going on to note that Chinese subjects preferred red more than British Caucasian ones.

Many news sources are reporting this study as a genetic difference in color preference. The authors hypothesize about evolutionary reasons they might have gotten these results, such as hunter/gatherer theory and socio-sexual facial color cues. This is not the same as testing the subjects' genes. In fact, they don't mention even testing the subjects (n = 208) for normal color vision, although they apparently gave some of them the Bem Sex Role Inventory -- surprisingly, men who fit cultural sterotypes of masculinity also prefer blue to red.

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I can't even begin on this one. Luckily, I already wrote it, in January, when I pointed out that the pink/blue dichotomy has not been consistent historically, and still isn't in Belgium, according to Color Matters. Instead, I'll give you part of the discussion section, which I'm sure you'll enjoy:

girls’ preference for pink may have evolved on top of a natural, universal preference for blue. We speculate that this sex difference arose from sex-specific functional specializations in the evolutionary division of labour. The hunter-gatherer theory proposes that female brains should be specialized for gathering-related tasks .... facilitate the identification of ripe, yellow fruit or edible red leaves embedded in green foliage .... An alternative explanation for the evolution of trichromacy is the need to discriminate subtle changes in skin color due to emotional states and social-sexual signals; again, females may have honed these adaptations for their roles as care-givers and ‘empathizers’.

Gerianne M. Alexander's 2003 review suggests that there may be evolutionary reasons why girls prefer some toys and boys prefer others. She suggests that there may be innate visual biases that draw children to specific features of the toys, including color:

Compared to boys, girls are also more likely to use a greater number of colors and to prefer warmer colors (i.e., pink and red) to cooler colors (i.e., blue and green). In toy choices and free drawings, then, boys appear to assign greater attention or interest to object movement and location, whereas girls appear to assign greater attention or interest to form and color."

Suggested explanations for this greater female emphasis on color include aid in foraging, spectral qualities of the human face (apparently males tend to have redder faces), or the idea that infant faces are more red-pink than adult faces.

The traditional assumption has been that children's associations of color with sex role is a socialization artifact. Picariello et al's (1990) experiments seem to show that children as young as 3 identify colors with sex roles. Children were asked to identify the sex of toy pigs who differed only in color, and their choices were consistent with adult sex-color stereotypes.

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So the hypothesis, as far as I can tell, is not that boys like blue, but that girls really like pink. I find Alexander's (2002) study of toy preferences among vervet monkeys interesting, but I question the interpretation of results. I'm fairly certain that a vervet monkey doesn't know what a cooking pot is for. Therefore, the result that more female vervets initiated contact with the pot than with the ball seems like an over extension to me. If there were other features of the pot to explain this (color or decoration) these were not explained in the article.

[edit]: According to Color Matters, pink was traditionally for boys and blue for girls through the 1920's, and in Belgium, this is still the case.

Oxygen study finds gender gap all but gone in consumer electronics.

A study commissioned by Oprah's Oxygen network suggests that the gender gap in consumer electronics has dwindled. The study surveyed preferences among 1,400 women and 700 men, and found that women would choose tech gadgets over jewelry or vacations.

This turn of events shouldn't be a surprise. Advertisers have long since realized that the women of America control the family budgets. Coverage of the study suggests that tech is replacing bling in the hearts of female consumers. This is true only in as much as tech is bling. The pink Razr, the pink iPod, the Nintendo "GameGirl" (aka the DS) have all been marketed heavily as female-friendly gadgets. Another factor may be the focus in consumer electronics towards consumer-level connectivity. It's no longer the case that only businesses expect to be connected in real-time. Results from the "Girls Gone Wired" study suggest that women expect to be more active in Instant Messaging, Text Messaging, and digital photo sharing -- the electronic equivalent of going to the bathroom in droves.

Rather than expecting to see more advertising to women electronics consumers (suggesting a mind-numbing level of advertising saturation), I would expect to see the electronics industry re-masculinizing certain products, such as we've already seen with skin care products. The tag line: "this is not your girlfriend's cell phone" is just around the corner.