Research Finds that Prospective Customers Discriminate Against Femininity in Photos

BALTIMORE, October 9, 2026 — Anything you put in front of a prospective customer can either help or hinder the likelihood of making a sale. This includes everything from the written word, graphics, video, sounds and music and of course, photos. A new study looked at how photos of people are used in the sales and marketing process, and more specifically, how customers reacted to the perceived femininity of the person in the photo.

The study, which was published in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science, found that prospective customers discriminate against femininity expressed in those photos, and that the femininity “penalty” is does not vary for customers that are men, women or nonbinary.

The study, “Frontiers: Discrimination Against Femininity in Headshots: A Field Experiment with AI-Enabled Controllable Stimuli Generation,” was conducted by Lan E. Luo of the Yale School of Management and Olivier Toubia of Columbia Business School.

The researchers used a generative AI model (specifically a generative adversarial network) to create realistic headshots and then change only how feminine the face looked, holding the same constant pose, the same general facial expression, and the same background, hairstyle and clothes. The researchers paired each headshot with pronouns (he/his, she/her or they/their) so that how gender identity influences behavior could be verified separately from how femininity influences behavior.

They tested the design in a field experiment for an online tutoring company that advertised on Meta. The ad itself was identical across conditions and contained no headshots or pronouns. After clicking, 2,880 prospective customers in the United States were randomly assigned to a landing page that featured one of 20 tutor profiles that varied femininity and pronouns. The Meta campaign ran for 50 days and generated 468,941 impressions.

What the study authors found was a consistent penalty for femininity at multiple stages of the purchase process. For example, the more feminine the person in the photo looked, the less likely it would be for visitors to try to get in touch, even though they would spend more time on the website, on average.

“Our findings challenge the idea that gender discrimination can be measured simply by names or pronouns alone,” said Luo. “Access to a more feminine headshot still produced meaningful drops in customer responses, which on average were largely similar, regardless of whether the consumers were evaluating male, female or nonbinary tutors.”

Interestingly, the results were different when study participants sat down for online laboratory studies where the same faces were rated as more trustworthy and more competent as femininity increased. In other words, behavior in the field went in the opposite direction.

“People can say one thing in a survey and do another when the decision is real,” said Toubia. “Consumers spent the most time considering the high-femininity tutors and still moved less often through the process.”

In other words, when a consumer is not in a position of being judged, by simply navigating a webpage, their biases may come through more clearly and more honestly than when they are aware that they are being observed in a study.

The study authors noted that femininity is a relatively stable visual attribute, unlike clothes or expression, and it can lead two people with the same gender identity and the same credentials to be treated differently.

“Disregarding headshots underestimates an important channel of bias,” added Luo. “Even if organizations address discrimination by gender identity, they may still treat candidates of the same identity differently just based on how feminine they look.”

Read the full study here.

About INFORMS and Marketing Science

INFORMS is the world’s largest association for professionals and students in operations research, AI, analytics, data science and related disciplines, serving as a global authority in advancing cutting-edge practices and fostering an interdisciplinary community of innovation. Marketing Science, a leading journal published by INFORMS, publishes research on quantitative marketing, consumer behavior, pricing, and strategy that informs managerial and policy decisions. INFORMS empowers its community to improve organizational performance and drive data-driven decision-making through its journals, conferences and resources. Learn more at www.informs.org or @informs.

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