FACT CHECK: Male population was less than half of female population according to 2019 UN report? Here’s the Truth...
Unbelievable statistical explanations, claiming to be facts based on reports misattributed to reputed international organizations often get a lot of engagement among social media users. Despite a number of online sources to verify the actual facts, we noticed one such claim related to world population going viral among Facebook users. Here is an investigation done […]
Unbelievable statistical explanations, claiming to be facts based on reports misattributed to reputed international organizations often get a lot of engagement among social media users.
Despite a number of online sources to verify the actual facts, we noticed one such claim related to world population going viral among Facebook users. Here is an investigation done by Fact Crescendo Sri Lankan on this claim.
Viral Posts in the Social Media
An image which quoted world population figures claiming to be based on UN 1st quarter Demography Report 2019 was shared by number of social media users. The startling facts mentioned in this figure stated that out of the 7.88 billion people on the planet in 2019 a shocking 5.68 billion were female whereas there were only 2.2 billion males, as seen below.
The post went on to share some other figures to justify why women should be more careful in showing attitude to any man because out of the 2.2 billion men only 1 billion are available for marriage and out of that only a mere percentage were actually eligible.
We noticed that these claims had been circulating since 2019 as seen below.
Below are some of the instances the when similar claims were shared in 2021.
There reports were based on a Nigerian news report published in 2019 as seen here
Fact Check
A glance on this fake message is enough to understand that this might be a joke that went viral for all the wrong reasons. However, since it is being widely shared, we decided to understand more about this fake claim as it attributed the figures to the United Nations. We started our investigation by looking at the Nigerian Newspaper report from 2019, the contributor for these viral claims. However, we did not find any link to UN demography report published in this article.
Hence, we forwarded this claim to United Nation’s Resident Public Information Officer in Sri Lanka. He denied the baseless social media claim and after contacting the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the responsible body of United Nations, we got the following clarification.
UNFPA did not publish quarterly demographic reports as mentioned in the viral message. The latest population projections published by the UN was the 2019 Revision of World Population Prospects
We were also informed that UNFPA publishes the State of World population report annually, which covers and analyses developments and trends in world population and demographics, as well as sheds light on specific regions, countries and population groups and the unique challenges they face.
The latest report is the State of World population 2021 is seen here
Another tool provided by the UN is the UNFPA World Population Dashboard
Since the claim was related to population figures from 2019, we decided to check 2019 Revision of World Population Prospects report. According to that report, there were more males than females in 2019. However, the difference is not a significant amount as portrayed in social media claims. As per the UN report data, in 2019 there were 3.89 billion males and 3.82 billion females out of the 7.71 billion total population.
Furthermore, did a search query for “Sex ratio of the total population (males per 100 females)” in the UN 2019 Revision of World Population Prospects report and got the following results.
As per the above search query on the UN 2019 World Population Prospects report, it’s clear there are slightly more males (101.7) compared to 100 females. Additionally, as seen in the geographic breakdown, the figure is slightly higher in Asia (104.7) while lowest in Europe (93.4) as per 2020 data.
We noticed that CheckYourFact had also done a fact check on this claim few days ago.
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Conclusion
In conclusion, we can say that facts related with above mentioned viral claim indicating that world’s male population was less than half that of female population as per a United Nations 2019 report are completely baseless and false.
As per the 2019 World Population Prospects report by the United Nations, out of the 7.71 world population, there were 3.89 billion males and 3.82 billion females
Also Read: FACT CHECK: එක්සත් ජාතීන්ගේ සංවිධානය විසින් වයස පිළිබඳව නව වර්ගීකරණයක් සිදු කර නැහැ!
Title:Male population was less than half of female population according to 2019 UN report?
Fact Check By: Kalana KrishanthaResult: False
