It is well known, that approximately every twelfth man and every 200st woman suffers from some form of color blindness. But what about some real life probability numbers concerning color vision deficiency?
What’s the Chance of Color Blindness?
If you are a teacher you might ask yourself:
What is the probability that one of my pupils is colorblind?
And what about the chance to have a color vision deficient pupil
if you have only boys in your class?
Your son is maybe colorblind and joining the kindergarten pretty soon.
How big is the chance, that there is another colorblind child in his class?
…and he might also play in a soccer team.
Will he be the only colorblind boy in the team?
Are you a football coach? What is the probability that
one of your players from a team of 33 has a color vision deficiency?
Or you are leading at work a team of eight persons.
What’s the chance, that you have a colorblind person in your team?
Let’s say you know 100 persons. The probability that one of them
is colorblind has to be pretty high. But how high is it really?
In general, if two people meet, how big is the chance
that they are both suffering from color vision deficiency?
Before I will reveal the answers to the questions above or before you can compute it yourself, you need some more input. To calculate probabilities certain assumptions—like a base probability of color blindness or a class size—have to be taken. The results below are therefore based on the following numbers:
- Probability of color blindness in men: 8%
- Probability of color blindness in women: 0.5%
- Average class size: 20 pupils
- Group line-up: 50% male – 50% female
Based on this assumptions I calculated the following probabilities of color vision deficiency. Hover over the letters to see the results. But before viewing them, why don’t you try to answer the questions yourself? Just take a guess and have a look how close you can get to the real probabilities of color blindness.
58% 81% 54% 57% 94% 29% 98.7% 0.18%
And in other words:
- Almost every teacher or trainer has a colorblind pupil or team member.
- If you are colorblind pupil, there is a big chance that there is another colorblind child in your class.
- You can almost be sure that you have at least one colorblind friend.
- Approximately every 500st handshake is between two colorblind persons.
If you have any further questions, don’t hesitate to contact me or just write a comment on this article.