A new study by the folks at the Pew Research Center turned up an interesting finding: Men appears twice as often as women when it comes to being featured in news photos on Facebook.
The research group analyzed posting from 17 national new outlets with at least 20 million unique visitors during Q3 of 2018. They found that of all the images analyzed, 53 percent were exclusively men. 22 percent were exclusively woman and the remaining 25 percent showed both men and women in the images.
When totaled up, men made up a full 67 percent and women just 33 percent of 53,067 photos analyzed. It wasn’t just one site that skewed results. Pew reports that all 17 sites studied had more men than women.
LINK: More women than men follow news and public affairs
While the U.S. population is split fairly evenly (women make up 50.8%), Pew points out that the results would naturally be skewed depending on the news covered. For example, the United States Senate is 75 percent male. Most professional sports coverage is male as well. What the study didn’t do was analyze whether the images were representative of the coverage.
LINK: Who is using Facebook?
When it comes to specific content, though, you can draw your own conclusions. In stories about the economy, just 9 percent of the photos featured exclusively women (compared to 69% only men). The closest distribution was in news items about entertainment. However, even there exclusively male photos were used 42 percent of the time while exclusively female photos were represented just 27 percent of the time.
Here’s another interesting stat: The average male face shown was 10 percent larger than the average female face.
Even in photos that had more than one person in it, men outnumbered women according to the study. The median post with multiple people showed one woman and two men.
Read the full study at Pew Research.