| This is a myth, often mixed with myths around color blindness and color vision. For peripheral vision, it's important to note that only the fovea - a tiny dot at the very center of our vision covering 1.5 degrees field of view - has the ability to resolve details and strong color. The rest is an out-of-focus, low-resolution, monochrome mess: at 6 degrees you're at a quarter visual acuity, and at 30 degrees (1/16th acuity) things start to fall off even faster. Note that our vision is not like looking through camera - you think your peripheral vision has color and detail because your visual cortex fills it in with its representation of what it saw or expects to see. Even if women had more rod cells in their peripheral vision (either from more cells in total or fewer cells in the important fovea), they'd just get slightly higher resolution out-of-focus monochrome. To cure the blurriness, their cornea and lens would need to be vastly different. For color vision, biological males (usually) only have one X chromosome, and mutations to cone cell related genes is "fatal": if it mutates slightly it just offsets color sensitivity, if it mutates too much it may cause a loss of sensitivity to a primary color altogether. Biological females (usually) have two X chromosomes that each contain the necessary genes. If one mutates, it only a affects some cone cells. If it mutates slightly, you get tetrachromacy - sensitivity to a fourth primary color and stronger color perception at the cost of some light sensitivity to the original primary color. If it mutates fatally, it just means lost light sensitivity for that color - not lost color perception. This is not too dissimilar to how we became trichromatic - red and green are very close in the spectrum because one is likely just an old mutation of the other. Biological males and females have differences, but they are rarely "males are better than females at X" or vice versa. |
At the upper long tail, biological males are better at basketball and tennis, for just two examples.