Despite well-established sex differences for cognition, audition, and somatosensation, few studies have
investigated whether there are also sex differences in visual perception. We report the results of fifteen
perceptual measures (such as visual acuity, visual backward masking, contrast detection threshold or
motion detection) for a cohort of over 800 participants. On six of the fifteen tests, males significantly
outperformed females. On no test did females significantly outperform males. Given this heterogeneity
of the sex effects, it is unlikely that the sex differences are due to any single mechanism. A practical
consequence of the results is that it is important to control for sex in vision research, and that findings
of sex differences for cognitive measures using visually based tasks should confirm that their results
cannot be explained by baseline sex differences in visual perception.