Posted: 08/30/2012 2:01 pm on Huff Post Science.
Co-authored with Jo Paoletti
Girls like pink and boys go for blue. There must be something biological behind this preference, right? Can we really link pinks and blues to innate sex differences? Science, and for that matter any scholarship, is about evidence. When can an observation count as evidence for a particular conclusion? Is it strong evidence, weak evidence, or just plain irrelevant? The ongoing conversation about gender and color preference highlights the problem.
One of us (Jo Paoletti) is an expert in dress history and has argued at length that the gender division in infant and toddler fashion is fairly recent and far from universal. The pink-for-girls/blue-for-boys divide used to be just the reverse in Belgium and parts of Germany and Switzerland. And pink-blue symbolism did not spread outside Europe until after the globalization of the children’s clothing market. In the United States there seems to have been no commonly accepted gender significance for infant clothing color until the middle of the 20th century. In fact, before 1920, baby clothing was almost completely gender-neutral.
The facts that the pink/blue gender distinction is historically new and not universal would seem to put the kibosh on the idea that gendered color preference is innate. But at least one psychologist has questioned the historical evidence. And therein lies the argument. Marco del Giudice recently published a letter in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior calling the kind of evidence Paoletti uses — museum objects and manuscripts — “anecdotal.” To be fair, both del Giudice and Paoletti agree that her argument has been misread as a claim that color preference once reversed in the United States. But this is not the point we make here. The question is, what counts as good evidence of a historical shift in consumer culture?