Sex, shopping and thinking pink” reports alleged biologically based talent for shopping and preference for pink within “female brains.” Nope, I’m not buying it either.

I plan to obtain the actual data supposedly supporting what strikes me as completely preposterous conclusions in this article (chock full of evo-psych phrases like “the primordial bargain of human hunter-gatherer societies”), so that I can get a second opinion from scientists I respect. Meanwhile, if you can stomach reading an article in The Economist that starts out with these two sentences:

WOMEN really are better than men at shopping. And they really do prefer pink.

Have at it here. Below is one short but annoying excerpt:

… On average, women were 9° more accurate than men at pointing to each stall—a significant deviation if you have to walk some distance to get to a place. This was not because those women had more experience of visiting the market than the men had. Nor did the women rate themselves as having a better sense of direction—indeed the men rated their own navigating skills more highly.
Dr New suggests that these results show women are better than men at the particular task of relocating sources of food. That contrasts with the idea that men are better at navigation in general. In other words, women’s minds are specialised for their ancestral task of gathering the sort of food that cannot run away. …

Alarmingly, my refrigerator is constantly “running,” yet neither I nor anyone I live with has gone hungry in consequence.
–Ann Bartow
Update: Echidne of the Snakes unpacks the “women prefer pink” study here.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 24th, 2007 at 5:58 pm and is filed under Feminism and Culture, Sexism in the Media, Sociolinguistics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.