Recently a couple decided to raise their child non gender specific and let their baby decide for his or herself what toys, clothes and colors they preferred. This study shows how men and women differ on color preferences. So this begs the question, are our color preferences influenced by our gender?

From the day that babies are brought home and cradled in their pink or blue blankets, implications have been made about gender and color. While there are no concrete rules about what colors are exclusively feminine or masculine, there have been studies conducted over the past seven decades that draw some generalizations.

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The new work by Sonya M. Kahlenberg and Richard W. Wrangham, described this week in the journal Current Biology, provides the first suggestive evidence of a wild non-human species playing with rudimentary dolls, as well as the first known sex difference in a wild animal’s choice of playthings.

The two researchers say their work adds to a growing body of evidence that human children are probably born with their own ideas of how they want to behave, rather than simply mirroring other girls who play with dolls and boys who play with trucks. Doll play among humans could have its origins in object-carrying by earlier apes, they say, suggesting that toy selection is probably not due entirely to socialization.

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Women’s and men’s washrooms: we encounter them nearly every time we venture into public space. To many people the separation of the two, and the signs used to distinguish them, may seem innocuous and necessary. Trans people know that this is not the case, and that public battles have been waged over who is allowed to use which washroom. The segregation of public washrooms is one of the most basic ways that the male-female binary is upheld and reinforced.

As such, washroom signs are very telling of the way societies construct gender. They identify the male as the universal and the female as the variation. They express expectations of gender performance. And they conflate gender with sex.

Link -via Metafilter

The study was carried out on mice but the implications are relevant to humans, the scientists said. By switching off a gene called FoxL2, which exists in all mammals, the ovary cells of adult female mice developed spontaneously into the fully developed, testosterone-producing cells found in male testes, although they could not produce sperm.

“We take it for granted that we maintain the sex we are born with, including whether we have testes or ovaries,” said Robin Lovell-Badge, from the Medical Research Council’s National Institute of Medical Research in north London, who was part of the international team led by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg.

The scientists noted that their research contradicts the claim that female is the default gender among embryos without a male sex-determining gene.

Link via Popular Science | Photo: US Department of Energy

Seasoned gamers were recruited to play each game for 30 minutes. The researchers analysed video of the sessions and recorded the demographics of each character that appeared on screen, no matter how briefly. They then weighted the results in proportion to each game’s sales. For example, characters in a game selling 2 million copies counted for twice as many character stereotype impressions as those in a game selling 1 million.[...]

Williams and his team found that male characters are “vastly more likely to appear” in games than females. They made up 85 per cent of characters, compared to 51 per cent of the real population.

Compared to the real population, African Americans were under-represented by 13 per cent and Hispanic/Latino people by 78 per cent. Asians were over-represented by 25 per cent and white people by 7 per cent.

The researchers also noted that video games originating in Asia demonstrated a similar disparity.

Link via Popular Science

Image: flickr user Gamer Score Blog used under Creative Commons License.

Here is some pretty clever comedy by Mark Gungor explaining how the male brain differs from the female. It all makes sense to me now.

Link: Youtube