Every day we are bombarded with digital images. They appear on our social media feeds, in our search results, and on the websites we browse. People send them to us via messaging apps or email. At the end of the day, billions more will have been uploaded and shared online.

With the average user spends 6 hours and 40 minutes per day on the Internetaccording to one report, these images constitute an important part of our daily visual intake.

And recent research indicates they might even influence our perceptions.

A study published earlier this year analyzed images on Google, Wikipedia and the Internet Movie Database (IMBD), looking specifically at which genres predominated when searching for different professions – like “farmer”, “CEO” or “TV journalist”. The conclusions were grim. Although women were overall underrepresented, gender stereotypes were strong. Categories such as “plumber,” “developer,” “investment banker,” and “heart surgeon” were significantly more likely to be male. “Housekeeper,” “nurse practitioner,” “cheerleader,” and “ballet dancer” were usually women.

So far, it’s not surprising. Anecdotally, I I noticed the same phenomenon myself. back in 2019, when I was trying to find parity images for this website. While searching Getty Creative, one of our main stock photo sites, I found that photographs of male doctors outnumbered those of female doctors by three to one – even though in the United States, for example, doctors under 44 at the time were more likely to be women than men. This representation of health professionals is only part of the problem. There were twice as many options for photos of women with babies, or for that matter women with salads, as for men.

The latest study, however, went further. Rather than simply showing the extent of gender bias in online images, the researchers tested whether exposure to these images had an impact on people’s own biases. As part of the experiment, 423 American participants used Google to search for different professions. Two groups searched by text, using Google or Google News; another group used Google Images instead. (A control group also used Google, but to search for categories unrelated to professions, such as “apple” and “guitar”). Next, all participants were given an “implicit association test,” which measures implicit bias.

Compared to text descriptions of occupations searched on Google, participants who used Google Images and received visual representations in response showed significantly higher rates of implicit gender bias after the experience – both immediately afterward and three days later. late.