Self-presentation in Online Professional Networks: Men's Higher and Women's Lower Facial Prominence in Self-created Profile Images

Abstract

Men are presented with higher facial prominence than women in the media, a phenomenon that is called face-ism. In naturalistic settings, face-ism effects could be driven by gender biases of photographers and/or by gender differences in self-presentation. The present research is the first to investigate whether women and men themselves create this different facial prominence. In a controlled laboratory study, 61 participants prepared a picture of themselves from a half-body photograph, allegedly to be uploaded to their profile for an online professional network. As expected, men cropped their photos with higher facial prominence than women did. However, women and men did not differ in the self-presentational motivations, goals, strategies, and personality variables under investigation, so that the observed face-ism effect could not be explained with these variables. Generally, the higher participants' physical appearance self-esteem, the higher was their self-created facial prominence.

Prominencia facial autoatribuida en redes sociales a través de la propia fotografía: Efecto del tipo de red, edad y género

“…The more variables are included to study face-ism, the more complex seems to be the phenomenon. In this line, it might explain the not significant differences found in previous studies, focused on only one SNS or in a narrower range of age (mainly, young people) (for instance, Hum et al, 2011 andKaufmann, 2018, focused on young people on Facebook and professional networks, respectively). The sex-gender construction is developed across biological, psychological, and social dimensions and is transformed through life experiences and learning.…”

“…Since the late 1970s, numerous studies have provided evidence of differences in the representation of women and men in pictures (Adams, Copeland, Fish & Hughes, 1980;Archer, Iritani, Kimes & Barrios, 1983;Copeland, 1989;Millard & Grant, 2006;Patton & Johns, 2007;Sczesny & Kaufmann, 2018), particularly in fields such as advertising (Belkaoui & Belkaoui, 1976;Furnham & Bitar, 1993;Ganahl, Prinsen & Netzley, 2003), politics (Konrath, Au & Ramsey, 2012;Konrath & Schwartz, 2007), and the internet (Szillis & Stahlberg, 2007). Whereas in men's pictures the focus is mainly on their faces (facial prominence), in women's pictures it is on their bodies (body prominence); they both correspond to social stereotypes which associate men with the mind and women with the body.…”

Facial Prominence of Political Candidates: Gender Differences in Private and Public Pages on Facebook Profile

“…This strongly points to an internalization of gender stereotypes and to what has been called “self-inflated face-ism” ( Smith and Cooley, 2012 ). This effect emerged also in a controlled laboratory study in which male and female participants were allowed to digitally modify their photographs to be allegedly posted in an online professional network ( Sczesny and Kaufmann, 2018 ).…”

Business-Oriented Social Network as a Platform for Personal Promotion

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This paper aims to investigate the influence of relevant factors on the personal promotion of businessoriented social network users. Motivation: Although personal promotion in online communities has been covered in academic literature (Sczesny & Kaufmann, 2018;Yu & Kim, 2020;Hollenbaugh, 2020), a significant gap in previous studies is found in neglecting influential factors on self-promotion through a business-oriented social network, such as LinkedIn. Therefore, this paper aims to explore LinkedIn users' opinions about the impact of selected constructs on this businessoriented social network setting.

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