If you’ve ever had a baby shower after finding out whether your bundle-to-be was a boy or a girl, you were probably up to your eyeballs in pink or blue - clothing, bibs, pacifiers, rattles - it all comes color-coordinated by gender!

In modern society, it is perhaps almost offensive to stereotype colors by gender. However, most of us still probably cringe at a man in a pink shirt, for example (my father-in-law wears pink sometimes and does it well, but DH won’t touch it) and my 2yo daughter is already showing fondness for that most frilly color. Why does pink seem to be such a feminine hue?

Well, it turns out that there may be scientific reasons for that preference. New research seems to suggest that, while there is actually a universal preference for blue, the sexes differ greatly when it comes to the color pink.

In the study, the researchers asked a group of men and women to look at about 1,000 pairs of colored rectangles on a computer screen in a dark room and pick the ones they liked best as quickly as possible.

Afterwards, [neuroscientist Anya] Hurlbert and colleagues plotted the results along the color spectrum and found that while men prefer blue, women gravitate towards the pinker end of the blue spectrum.

Researchers speculate that there is evolutionary support for women’s preference for reds and pinks. Pink is a healthy skin color; red signifies ripeness in various fruits and vegetables. These colors would have been preferred as women gathered fruit and other food for their tribes in days past.

Men had no need to develop a preference for pink/red above their natural affinity for blue, since they were primarily hunters and merely needed to identify a moving target as a food source.

The next time my daughter insists on wearing her pink dress instead of her almost identical blue one, I’m not going to argue with her. I’ll just smile to myself and pull it over her head, knowing that her color preferences may well be much older than either of us.

Posted by Sunshine.