Pew: Twice as Many Men as Women in News Photos on Facebook
News photos on Facebook portray men twice as frequently as women, the Pew Research Center reported Thursday. Researchers analyzed news images from public posts from the Facebook pages of 17 national news outlets, April 1-June 30, 2018, as part of…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
Pew’s exploration of ways a computational method called "machine vision" allows researchers to analyze large quantities of photos, it said. The study looked at more than 22,000 news photos containing “identifiable human faces,” finding that 53 percent exclusively showed men and 22 percent exclusively women. “All 17 national news outlets included in the study showed more men than women in news images on Facebook during the study period,” Pew said. The researcher cautioned that “there is no perfect benchmark" for how often men and women should be portrayed in news images on social media, citing politics and sports in which men dominate.