[mark_integerdsv]

Interesting, a cursory scan through suggests that in groups of friends, the men stay together whilst the women tend to have moved on/away from the group.

I wonder is this has to do with the communication styles of men and women where men focus on shared experience whilst women focus on outwardly shared communication (do things together as opposed to talk about things together.)

[lucozade]

It's probably a little simpler than that. My guess is that, in the 2 pictures, the boys were friends and the girls were girlfriends of the boys.

It's also likely that one of the friends saw the photographer's advert and between them only had contact details for the other men. I doubt it's possible to extrapolate much as there were plenty of women in the other photos.

[StefanKarpinski]

I noticed that as well, but only in groups that are mainly men. I immediately wondered if it was the effect of (unconscious, presumably) bias on the photographer's part – i.e. that in a photo of a group of male friends, the women are decorative or less essential somehow. Another explanation is that the guys all knew each other well while they only knew the girls in the photos in passing, making them harder to track down. But the photographer managed to track down so many other people, that hardly seems to explain it.

[lucozade]

There's probably a form of survivor ship bias going on here.

From the text he took a lot of photos. If he advertised in local newspapers, school/football club sites etc, he wouldn't need to find everyone. He'd just need find someone who could get a quorum of the people from a particular photo.

As such, it's probably more likely that he'd only find friends as he wouldn't need to find the group, just an individual. If, for example, he had found one of the girls but not a boy, chances are he wouldn't have taken the photo.