Yeah, it's a pretty easy claim to make when you take a painting by a female artist, then cherry-pick a similar-looking but obviously inferior one by a male artist. More people are obviously going to lean towards the former. Also, you're asking people which paintings they prefer, not what they actually like. There's a difference. I would prefer to drink a glass of urine than to eat a bowl of shit, but I really wouldn't want to ever consume either of them.

Not to mention 54% preferred the female artists? That's not really a significant difference. As people have already said here, that's practically a coin flip.

The result was the same in a second experiment asking participant to guess which work was more popular among those surveyed. But in the third and fourth experiments, when asked which of the two works was more valuable and which artist was more famous, number of guesses for female paintings fell by 10 percent and 9 percent, respectively.

The final experiment compared responses from two groups, one of which was told which of the two artists was more famous—almost always the man. That group was 14 percent more likely to guess that the male artists’ work was more popular.

This is not a quantification of popularity! This is a fucking guessing game! Most people don't know anything about these paintings or their affiliated artists, let alone whether they even existed prior to seeing them (which goes to show just how popular they really are). Nevermind that the fame/popularity of paintings and artists today does not match what they were back in their times. We need not mention the number of artists who lived their whole lives in poverty, yet whose paintings sell for millions decades or centuries after their deaths.

The only people who honestly give a damn about the vast majority of historical paintings and painters are the same art snobs within the communities and universities that claim to see sexism everywhere. Which goes to show how in the end, all they're doing is projecting.