Why Pew Research Center studied news photos on Facebook

Researchers chose to study news images on Facebook because the site standardizes the presentation of news images and text across outlets. News posts that appear in social media feeds like Facebook feature large photographs and contain only a small amount of text and a link to a longer article. In contrast to other formats such as print media, the photograph in a Facebook post occupies more screen space than the accompanying text and is the main object that Facebook users see when they scroll through the news feed.

There are several ways to measure how often men and women appear in news photos. One way is to think about all the photos together as making up one big crowd of people and estimating what share are women versus men. Women made up 33% of all the 53,067 individuals identified in news post images, while men made up the other 67%.

Another way to look at the data is to examine the mix of people who appear in each image. Across the 22,342 posts with photos containing identifiable human faces, more than half of them (53%) exclusively showed men, while less than a quarter showed exclusively women (22%). The remaining images (25%) show at least one man and one woman.

All 17 news outlets included in the study showed more men than women in news images on Facebook during the study period. The share of individuals who were identified as women by the model ranges from 25% to 46%, by outlet.

While these findings are striking, there is no perfect benchmark or “true ratio” for how often men and women should be portrayed in news images on social media. Yes, the U.S. population is divided nearly in half, male versus female. But, for example, all the representational coverage of professional football teams would return results overwhelmingly dominated by male faces. Coverage of the U.S. Senate –

A sizable proportion of the Facebook news images posted by the outlets examined in this study exclusively depict men. Across the news images that showed people, 22% showed exclusively women and 53% showed exclusively men.

Researchers trained a text classification model to determine which news posts related to these four topics. This kind of model is based on human decisions about which words are associated with particular topics in a sample of posts. The model then makes predictions about whether any of the posts mention those topics. All posts with news photos were included when classifying the content of the posts – those that showed people and those that did not.

The model used text that appeared alongside the post, including its title, caption and comment. Researchers validated the results of the models by asking human coders to examine a subset of posts.

When it comes to how prominently individuals' faces were depicted in news photos, there was a modest difference between men and women. Researchers measured the size of women's faces relative to that of men's faces to capture prominence. The technique researchers used to measure faces only captures the size of a person's face, omitting features like hair, jewelry and headwear. The average male face occupied 3.8% of an image on average, while the average female face took up 3.5% of an image. These differences amount to the average male face being shown at a size 10% larger than the average female face.

The average size of women's faces was 19% smaller than the average size of men's faces in posts that discussed the economy. In posts that mentioned entertainment, women's faces were 7% larger than men's faces, on average.

Even among news images that featured multiple people, women had the largest face visible in the photograph for only 32% of images.

Across outlets, women never appear more often than men

On average, none of the media outlets examined in the study showed more women than men in news photos. Among the outlets examined here, the percent of women depicted (among all individuals shown) ranged from 25% to 46% per outlet.

Each outlet created 2,592 posts in the three months between April 1 and June 30, 2018, on average, including all posts, whether their photos showed people or not. The outlet level total varied from 878 to 3,975 posts. A total of 1,471 posts – 3.3% of the full sample – were posted by news outlets multiple times with the same text and image; these posts are included in the analysis.

Out of the 17 media outlets, six showed women more prominently than men, on average, in terms of how large their faces appeared.