According to a new study, both the sexes see colours differently, with the women being able to distinguish between subtle shades of yellow, green and blue.
Research has shown that male and female brains process colours in slightly different ways, the 'Daily Mail' reported.
This means that if both sexes look at an orange, it will appear redder to the man than to the woman. Similarly, grass looks yellower to a man and greener to a woman.
The differences don't end there as the experiments from the City University of New York also showed that men struggle to distinguish subtle differences in shades of yellow, green and blue.
The effect is very small but it might mean that choosing a shade of paint from the dozens on a colour chart is a job best suited to a woman.
The intriguing findings come from experiments in which men and women were shown flashes of light and asked to name the colours they saw.
More From This Section
All had normal vision and none were colour blind, a trait that is known to be much more common in men than in women.
According to researcher Professor Israel Abramov, the differences between the sexes' colour vision cannot be explained by differences in the structure of the eye.
The male sex hormone testosterone is likely to affect how the brain processes and makes sense of the information taken in by the eye.
"We hypothesise that testosterone plays a major role, somehow leading to different connectivities for males and females," said Abramov, who described the sex differences as "small but very real"
Abramov is unsure, however, how big an impact the differences have outside the lab and in the real world.
Vision is far from the only sense to differ between the sexes.
Research has shown women to have a better hearing and more acute senses of taste and smell, the journal 'Biology of Sex Differences' reports.
Experiments show men to be particularly good at detecting fine detail in moving images - a trait that might have made our male ancestors good hunters.