Not a bad question.

But I must add that to me the sun does look white rather than yellow.

Anyway, there is very little selective pressure on us to balance our colour perceptions precisely to match sunlight, which is just as well; the light we see is by no means constant. Instead we keep adjusting our perception of colour to match the light we see. A good example is that people who have been living under several metres of sea water for a couple of weeks come up red-starved; seawater is less transparent to red light than to blue and yellow. For some time after they surface, everything looks disconcertingly red to them. However, their eyes soon adjust to the light balance at the surface, and the "excess" subjective red soon disappears.

We have no definite  standard to which our eyes can adjust, so our dynamic adjustment causes some very confusing optical illusions.

Morning light differs from full daylight, but it takes a sensitive and alert eye to see that. A patch of sky seen out of context with nothing to compare, looks white rather than blue. stripes of uniform colour next to stripes of different colours, each stripe of a colour that is constant across its width, seem to have borders of a (usually) greater depth. And so on.

And of course, if you have been locked in a blue room for a few days, sunlight will look decidedly yellow when you emerge, even if you are not  very colour-sensitive.

To me the "neutral" white is the daylight of a cloudy but not dark day.

Sunlight is decidedly more yellow than that, evening light - more blue.

Sunlight is not what we have every day all day, it is something special, "golden", precious. Maybe Jon sees it as white because South Africa is generally more sunny than the parts of Europe where I usually live and travel.

Oh, I've thought of a much better answer that applies to sunny countries!

The sky is blue, so direct sunlight is more yellow than dispersed sky-light. So either the sunlight looks yellow or the shadows blue or both, especially in the evening when even more blue is filtered out of the sunlight and dispersed over the whole sky.

 Do shadows look blue to you Jon, as sunlight looks white?

Why do we perceive the sun as yellow?

Do You/We ?

Children use to paint a yellow sun (on white paper) in

their drawings.

Yellow is the brightest colour available, that is maybe "reason"

for the children.

But do we percieve that way? Nobody ever has looked

to the sun really.

Georg

That we perceive sunlight as yellow because of the preferential scattering of shorter wavelengths has been covered by other answers.

In the context of this question I would add that staring directly at the sun is not, fortunately, something we do a great deal of. When we consider the more normal case the objects we view on the ground are illuminated not only by direct sunlight but also by the scattered shorter wavelengths resulting in incident light which more closely approximates white light.

Of course, as stated elsewhere, it has not been established that we necessarily should perceive the most common illuminating light as being "white".