Influence of age and gender in business photographs

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In 2017 I wrote an article in my Dutch blog Prettybusiness about the website Photofeeler, where I had my LinkedIn profile photo anonymously assessed. I received a lot of positive reactions and many of my readers had their photos assessed. Photofeeler has now analysed more than 1 million votes on about 100.000 LinkedIn photographs. What’s interesting it that they use this information to map, amongst other things, the influence of age and gender in business photographs. In this article, I will give you a look at the figures.

 

Age and Gender

In the picture below you can see the results of the analyses. Both men and women are divided into four categories starting at the age of 18. 

Scores were appointed to each group on how people judged them on confidence, friendliness, and influence based on their LinkedIn profile photo. 

 

The worst and best scores

If you look at the scores for young women in their 20’s you see that in this category women clearly score better than men. At Photofeeler they’ve concluded that men in this age category pay less attention to their profile photo than women. The quality of the photos is not as good and men tend to look less groomed and are often wearing casual clothes. 

Of all the categories, men over 35 years of age scored the best.

 

Competent

When it comes to appearing competent men do better than women. The older the man, the more competent he appears.  For women, this assessment is not age-dependent. 

 

Friendliness

In general, people view younger women as having the friendliest appearance and older women are perceived as being less friendly. Men of every age score worse in this category when compared with ladies. 

 

Influential 

When it comes to appearing influential young women score better than young men but in their 30’s men take the lead in this category.

 

Conclusion

It is difficult to draw a firm conclusion based on these results. The figures show how old fashioned gender roles play a part when judging someone on their business photograph. After all, in society, we still see older men in many of the top positions and this undoubtedly influences how we view people.  

With this in mind, I am not surprised that men score better when it comes to appearing competent. If this is justified is another question. What I find strange about this is that Photofeeler being an international company did not distinguish between countries and cultures.  I would be very curious to know, for example, if Europeans rate photos differently than Americans.  Perhaps they will share this information in the future, I will keep an eye out and keep you posted.

Greetings,

Aileen