Can women suffer from color vision deficiencies?
Yes, women can suffer from color vision deficiencies. Eight percent (varies depending on the study you quote) of the men and 0.5% of the women in the world are born color deficient. That’s as high as one out of twelve men and one out of two hundred women. The commonest forms of congenital defective color vision, the red-green deficiencies, are due to “sex-linked X chromosomes” and “simple recessive hereditary traits”. Men are mainly affected because women have two X chromosomes and men have only one X and a Y chromosome. If a man’s one X chromosome is color defective, he will be color deficient, where as a woman must inherit two color defective X chromosomes to be color deficient. For a woman to be color deficient, her father must be colorblind and her mother must be colorblind or a carrier.
