Gender Differences in Color Naming: Direct Mail Order Advertisements

Abstract

N A SEMINAL WORK ON GENDER DIFFERENCES in speech, Robin Lakoff (1975) invents a conversation between a man and woman to illustrate lexical differences between the sexes. Readers are asked to imagine how the woman, then the man, would describe a wall painted a pinkish shade of purple. She asserts, The woman may say 'The wall is mauve,' with no one consequently forming any special impression of her as a result of the words alone; but if the man should say 'The wall is mauve,' one might well conclude he was imitating a woman sarcastically or was a homosexual or an interior decorator (8-9). Contemporary readers who deplore gender bias, or who are the target of Lakoff's interpretation, may lament the extent to which her observations continue to strike positive chords of recognition in either sex. Other readers, among them linguists, may think it more useful to explore ways to substantiate the conclusions she draws from that single and hypothetical (albeit persuasive) example: first, that women make far more precise discriminations in naming colors than do men [so that] words like beige, ecru, aquamarine, lavender, and so on are unremarkable in a woman's active vocabulary, but absent from that of most men; second, that men tend to relegate to women things that are not of concern to them, or do not involve their egos. Among these are problems of fine color discrimination and deciding whether to name a color lavender or mauve. Have these assertions been tested by empirical studies? A review of the literature reveals extensive research (and some controversy) on color perception and its representation in language (e.g., Berlin and Kay 1969, Kay and McDaniel 1975, Bornstein 1975) but relatively little research that has specifically addressed gender differences in color naming. Earlier studies showed females to be faster than males in correctly naming colors (Ligon 1932, DuBois 1939) and superior in assigning names consistently to a wide range of colors (Chapanis 1965). More recently, in testing for preferences in ordering conjoined color terms (e.g., black and white), females showed stronger ordering tendencies than males (Conley and Cooper 1981). However, aside from these studies, to my knowledge only one has tested Lakoff s claim: Steckler and Cooper's (1980) experimental controlled study of subjects' use of color terms in describing an article of