A gender difference in color preference among British participants has been repeatedly reported, in which both males and females show a preference for blue-green colors, while females express an additional preference for pink-purple colors. To investigate the robustness of gender difference in color preference in a different culture, we tested 81 young adult Indians from a school of design and compared them to 80 young British students in Psychology. The 35-item International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) and Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI) questionnaires were also administered to explore possible links between personality traits, gender schemata, and color preferences. Results confirmed a gender difference in both cultures; participants collectively expressed a preference for cool over warm colors, while in addition females showed a preference for pink colors, with a warm bias for Indian females and a cool bias for British females. While these results extend gender difference to Indian culture and support the universality of an underlying pattern they also reveal a culture-specific contribution essentially observed in females. In British participants, color preference was correlated exclusively with BSRI scores in females and overwhelmingly with IPIP scores in males; this gender-specific pattern of correlation was not replicated in the Indian sample. Results point to an archetypal pattern of gender difference in color preference with a remarkable cross-cultural similarity in men and a subtle but significant cultural difference in women whose origin is yet to be explained. K E Y W O R D Scolor preference, cultural difference, gender difference, principal component analysis | I NT ROD UCTI ONIn context-free situations, people are willing to rank colors in order of preference or to indicate a preferred color out of several different options. However, studies are not unanimous as whether or not robust gender differences on color preference exist nor, if they do, the extent to which they are pancultural.

The canonical application of multidimensional scaling (MDS) methods has been to color dissimilarities, visualizing these as distances in a low-dimensional space. Some questions that remain are how well the locations of stimuli in color space can be recovered when data are sparse, and how well can systematic individual variations in perceptual scaling be distinguished from stochastic noise? We collected triadic comparisons for saturated and desaturated sets of Natural Colour System (NCS) samples, each set forming an approximate hue circle. Maximum-Likelihood MDS was used to reconstruct the configuration of stimuli more accurately than the standard 'vote-count' approach. Individual departures from the consensus response pattern were minor, but repeated across stimulus sets, and identifiable as variations in the salience of color-space axes. No gender differences could be discerned, contrary to earlier results.