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When and why should I disable my profile picture?

You might hide your photo to keep early screening focused on your experience rather than your appearance. Photo experiments show that appearance can help, hurt, or make no detectable difference, so this control provides a privacy choice—not a guaranteed increase in callbacks. [1–3]

Reviewed November 8, 2026 (America/Chicago). These studies are not a personal hiring-odds calculator.

Overall

No single global effect: Randomized résumé-photo experiments find positive, negative, and undetectable effects depending on country, occupation, sex, and perceived attractiveness. Comparing attractive and less-attractive photographs is not necessarily the same as comparing any photograph with none. [1–3]

  • Israel: benefits for some men, penalties for women. Ruffle and Shtudiner sent 5,312 CVs to 2,656 vacancies. Attractive men received significantly more callbacks than men without photos and men rated plain-looking; callbacks nearly doubled relative to the latter group. Women without photos received significantly more callbacks than women with attractive or plain-looking photos. Online publication: 2014; journal issue: 2015. The authors’ proposed jealousy explanation is an interpretation, not a general fact about women recruiters. [1]
  • Argentina: attractiveness premium, not a general photo premium. López Bóo, Rossi and Urzúa’s 2010 experiment, published 2013, submitted 2,540 résumés. Attractive-photo applicants received callbacks at 10.3%, versus 7.6% for less-attractive-photo applicants: 2.7 percentage points, approximately 36% more callbacks. The overall attractiveness premium did not differ significantly between men and women. Including a photo by itself did not affect callbacks or response times. The vacancies covered several non-tech occupations in Buenos Aires. [2]
  • Germany and the Netherlands: mixed results. A 2024 paper using 2016–2018 fieldwork found that unveiled Turkish women in the Netherlands benefited from including photographs; the premium disappeared with a Muslim headscarf. Unveiled Moroccan women had no discernible photo advantage or disadvantage. The authors found incentives for some minority women in Germany to omit photographs, particularly those wearing headscarves. Photo phenotype did not affect responses for Moroccan and Turkish men in either country. These are context-specific results, not estimates for all minorities. [3]
  • LinkedIn engagement is not hiring success. LinkedIn’s March 2017 product article reports up to 21 times more profile views and 9 times more connection requests with a photograph. It does not report a randomized hiring experiment or enough methods to establish causality. Those are not interview or offer multipliers, or estimates of a JobTangent privacy toggle. [4]

By group

Sex and attractiveness

Israel and Argentina point in different directions for women: the former favored no-photo women; the latter found an overall attractiveness premium without a significant male–female difference. Neither “photos always help attractive people” nor “women should always hide photos” follows. Attractiveness means study ratings or manipulations, not a measure of personal worth or competence. [1,2]

What a photo reveals

A photo can signal perceived race, sex, age and attractiveness, so these topics overlap; what a recruiter infers is not necessarily someone’s identity. [1–3,15] Large audits generally find racial callback gaps, while software-engineering results vary by job level and sex; a European photo experiment also isolated disadvantages associated with nonwhite appearance, not just names. [15; see race-page sources 1,2,5] See the race research page, results table and chart-data notes, with chart data; neither name-based gaps nor photo-appearance comparisons prove a benefit from removing a photo.

Age

Neumark, Burn and Button’s experiment of over 40,000 applications found robust age discrimination against older women, especially near retirement, and considerably less evidence against men after methodological corrections. It did not estimate how hiding a profile photo changes those effects. A no-photo setting cannot promise to eliminate age discrimination or assign an age-specific gain from this result. [12]

Disability type

The main US accounting disability audit tested cover-letter disclosure, not visible disabilities in photographs: spinal cord injury and Asperger’s syndrome produced similar employer-interest disadvantages. It supplies no photo-hiding estimate for wheelchair users, facial differences, autism, mental-health conditions, or other disability groups. No verified disability-type-specific photo-toggle estimate was established in this review. [13]

In tech

For race-specific tech screening results and their limits, see the race research page.

Limits

  • No universal current US tech hiring-odds multiplier for showing or hiding a photograph was established here. Résumé attachments, LinkedIn profiles, and JobTangent privacy controls differ. [1–4,10]
  • Experiments support causal claims about the signals actually randomized, not automatic transfers across countries, occupations, eras, or outcomes. Most studies here concern callbacks, not offers or completed hires. [1–3,5,6,9,10]
  • A null result is not proof of identical treatment by every employer. The firm-level variation in Kline and colleagues’ study is important. [6]
  • Photo privacy is not a guarantee against discrimination. Name-based experiments show that removing one cue leaves others. [5,6,9]
  • LinkedIn’s engagement numbers are platform claims, not independent causal hiring research. Paik, Shahani-Denning and Griffeth’s 2014 LinkedIn-profile evaluation study was located bibliographically, but its publisher full text could not be retrieved reliably; no substantive result or numerical estimate from it is relied on here. Hofstra verifies its citation, not its findings. [4,14]

Sources

Every URL below returned readable content through WebFetch on November 8, 2026. Where publishers timed out, readable institutional summaries or publisher-supplied abstracts are used. Failed Paik publisher URLs are omitted.

  1. Ruffle & Shtudiner, Are Good-Looking People More Employable?, online 2014; Management Science 2015: https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1927

  2. López Bóo, Rossi & Urzúa, 2013. J-PAL summary; fieldwork 2010: https://www.povertyactionlab.org/evaluation/impact-physical-appearance-employer-interest-argentina

  3. Fernández-Reino & Rovira, Do ethnic minorities have incentives to omit photographs from résumés?, Oxford Review of Economic Policy 2024. Publisher-supplied RePEc abstract: https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/oxford/v40y2024i3p579-591..html

  4. LinkedIn, LinkedIn Profile Photo Tips: Introducing Photo Filters and Editing, March 14, 2017: https://www.linkedin.com/blog/member/product/linkedin-profile-photo-tips-introducing-photo-filters-and-editing

  5. Bertrand & Mullainathan, Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal?, NBER 2003; American Economic Review 2004: https://www.nber.org/papers/w9873

  6. Kline, Rose & Walters, Systemic Discrimination Among Large U.S. Employers, NBER 2021; Quarterly Journal of Economics 2022: https://www.nber.org/papers/w29053

  7. Quillian, Pager, Hexel & Midtbøen, 2017 meta-analysis. Russell Sage Foundation abstract: https://www.russellsage.org/research/outputs/meta-analysis-field-experiments-shows-no-change-racial-discrimination-hiring-over

  8. Quillian & Lee, 2023 six-country meta-analysis. Northwestern summary: https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2023/01/racial-discrimination-in-hiring-remains-a-persistent-problem-northwestern-study?fj=1

  9. Oreopoulos, 2011 Canadian experiment. J-PAL summary; fieldwork 2008–2009: https://www.povertyactionlab.org/evaluation/discrimination-against-skilled-immigrants-canadian-labor-market

  10. Weisshaar, Chavez & Hutt, Hiring Discrimination Under Pressures to Diversify, American Sociological Review 2024, Table 2 and limitations: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00031224241245706

  11. Kline, Rose & Walters, A Discrimination Report Card, American Economic Review 2024: https://www.nber.org/papers/w32313

  12. Neumark, Burn & Button, NBER 2015; Journal of Political Economy 2019: https://www.nber.org/papers/w21669

  13. Ameri et al., NBER 2015; ILR Review 2018: https://www.nber.org/papers/w21560

  14. Hofstra University, verifying Paik, Shahani-Denning & Griffeth (2014), Journal of Organizational Psychology 14(1), 52–66: https://www.hofstra.edu/applied-organizational-psychology/research.html

  15. Polavieja et al. (2023), photo-based race experiment; UC3M institutional summary: https://www.uc3m.es/ss/Satellite/UC3MInstitucional/en/Detalle/Comunicacion_C/1371356488122/1371216001705/A_study_analyses_racial_discrimination_in_job_recruitment_in_Europe