Newspaper photoshops male cricketer to tower over female colleague who is actually taller than him

We've come to expect weird photoshopping action from certain publications, but not from huge national broadsheet publications with a track record of good (if conservative) reporting and banging true-crime podcasts.

Alas, it is indeed The Australian that this week has found itself in the middle of a why-on-earth-would-you-photoshop-that row, after people noticed something was a bit off about the image of cricketers David Warner and Ellyse Perry.

The issue lies with the height of the two players, who in case you hadn't worked it out, are a man and a woman respectively.

IRL, Perry (female) is way taller than Warner (male). Warner seems totally chill and normal with it because fellas is it gay to have a colleague that's taller than you is as ridiculous as it sounds. But it seems there may have been an editor somewhere who figured that men are so *SO* fragile, that they should definitely photoshop away the height difference.

Not only that, but the final version of the picture shows Warner actually taller than Perry?! Like, substantially so. It's truly bizarre.

Apparently, the newspaper had to use two separate images of the cricketers and paste them together, and that's how the error occurred. It's unclear whether someone made the deliberate choice to have Warner tower over Perry, or whether subconscious bias led the image to turn out that way because an intern who's never met a tall woman pasted them together in a blind spiral of patriarchal norms and problematic gender stereotypes. Either way, it's really really not a good look.

Writer Jess McGuire brought this to people's attention on Twitter yesterday.

And no one was impressed.

But, to add some levity to a story which is ultimately about the damaging ways in which women are still consistently and subconsciously subjugated by society, some used the opportunity to reference Warner's most famous viral moment to date: #SandpaperGate

The takeaway: some women are tall – deal with it.

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