Are There Gender Differences in Professional Self-Promotion? An Empirical Case Study of LinkedIn Profiles Among Recent MBA Graduates

“We apply traditional statistical matching tools for quasiexperimental design, propensity score matching (Rosenbaum and Rubin 1983), to identify similarly qualified female and male users on the LinkedIn platform and then examine potential gender differences in self-promotion.”

“Note that a caliper (Rosenbaum and Rubin 1985; Althauser and Rubin 1970) is defined as a permissible difference between female and male users to still be considered a match.”

“The recent explosion of diverse online social networking platforms provides users an unprecedented opportunity to express themselves, share information, engage each other and communicate directly with organizations (Kietzmann et al. 2011).”

“We implement these matching models with the R MatchIt package, version 2.4-21 (Ho et al. 2007).”

“In the professional setting, self-presentation strategies are critical to career advancement (Rudman 1998).”

“We follow practical recommendations and best practices for matching discussed in (Rubin and Thomas 1996; Rubin 2006).”

“There are numerous studies specifically analyzing offline self-presentation in professional settings (Giacalone and Rosenfeld 2013; Roberts 2005), though research is only beginning to unravel how self-presentation translates to online professional settings (Haferkamp et al. 2012; Sievers et al.…”

“There are numerous studies specifically analyzing offline self-presentation in professional settings (Giacalone and Rosenfeld 2013; Roberts 2005), though research is only beginning to unravel how self-presentation translates to online professional settings (Haferkamp et al. 2012; Sievers et al.…”

“We follow practical recommendations and best practices for matching discussed in (Rubin and Thomas 1996; Rubin 2006).”

“…are numerous studies specifically analyzing offline self-presentation in professional settings (Giacalone and Rosenfeld 2013; Roberts 2005), though research is only beginning to unravel how self-presentation translates to online professional settings (Haferkamp et al. 2012; Sievers et al. 2015).”

“While previous efforts have examined self-promotion in other settings including scholarly self-citations (King et al. 2016), this work evaluates gender differences in self-promotion on a professional social networking site.”

“As explained in more detail in (Greiner and Rubin 2011; Holland 2003), a causal inquiry of the effect of a personal attribute like race or gender would mean randomizing these attributes at conception in order to truly quantify the effect of gender and control for all post-treatment variables.”

“As explained in more detail in (Greiner and Rubin 2011; Holland 2003), a causal inquiry of the effect of a personal attribute like race or gender would mean randomizing these attributes at conception in order to truly quantify the effect of gender and control for all post-treatment variables.”

“…(Bertrand and Mullainathan 2004), the effect of perceived gender on social media influence (Nilizadeh et al. 2016), differences in self-disclosure rates on Facebook (Wang, Burke, and Kraut 2016), and an analysis of gender bias in computer science faculty hiring (Way, Larremore, and Clauset 2016).”

“Note that a caliper (Rosenbaum and Rubin 1985; Althauser and Rubin 1970) is defined as a permissible difference between female and male users to still be considered a match.”

“This analysis of online self-presentation contributes to the rapidly developing literature documenting gender bias in the professional and social marketplaces such as differences in callback rates when randomizing the gender of a name on a resume (Bertrand and Mullainathan 2004), the effect of perceived gender on soci…”

“…are numerous studies specifically analyzing offline self-presentation in professional settings (Giacalone and Rosenfeld 2013; Roberts 2005), though research is only beginning to unravel how self-presentation translates to online professional settings (Haferkamp et al. 2012; Sievers et al. 2015).”

“[2] analyzed self-promotion in LinkedIn, finding that women are more modest than men in expressing accomplishments and are less likely to use free-form fields.”

“Œird, there can be systematic di‚erences in the way in which documents are constructed, as in the case of di‚erent sections in online resumes, which are completed at di‚erent rates by men and women [2]; these di‚erences may systematically a‚ect ranking algorithms.”

“Similar to previous findings on LinkedIn [2], we find that men are significantly more likely to fill out their biography, to link to their Github, LinkedIn, Twitter, or personal websites on Stack Overflow.”

“, tendency to click on results of a certain kind), and biases in the corpus itself (such as different sections of resumes completed at different rates by men and women [1]).”

“Third, there can be systematic discrepancies in the way in which documents are constructed, as in the case of certain sections in online resumes, which are completed differently by men and women [1]; these discrepancies may in turn systematically affect ranking algorithms.”

“Entrepreneurial identity was measured by the number of students, graduates and alumni who classified themselves as entrepreneurs on the LinkedIn database, adjusted for student number following the precedent of prior studies (Christofides, Muise, and Desmarais 2009) because disclosure as self-promotion indicates a posi…”

“Gender effects and musical expression are thus exceptionally hard to untangle, making the problem more severe here than in other creative fields or mundane settings that have been studied before (Lutter 2015; Altenburger et al. 2017; Wachs et al. 2017; Altenburger and Ugander 2018).”

“that may explain why they may be better known [1].”

“Altenburger et al. (2017) analyzed gender differences in self-promotion choices on LinkedIn profiles.”

“Matching methods have been used in answering public health and socio-economic questions using social media data (Dos Reis and Culotta 2015; De Choudhury and Kıcıman 2017; Altenburger et al. 2017; Park et al. 2020).”

“find that female MBA graduates are less likely to use freeform data fields on their profiles (such as the Summary and Job Description fields) but are just as likely to include structured fields (such as Honours and Skills) (Altenburger et al. 2017).”

“Scholars create a LinkedIn professional networking account to encourage self-promotion and confidence to network [15].”

“The findings of the present study are further substantiated by previous work (e.g., [4]) who also found that women relative to men are less likely to utilize data fields that require writing in free-form such as the Summary.”

“, 2002); women MBA graduates were less likely to utilize free-form data fields to promote themselves in their LinkedIn profiles (Altenburger et al., 2017); and women researchers made fewer self-citations than men (King et al.”

“In regards to RO2 , and to estimate the effect of users’ demo-graphics on their emotions, a Propensity Score Matching (PSM) method will be conducted while adjusting for the influences of the confounding variables [1].”

“Other studies have focused on the structure and content of LinkedIn profiles, such as their influence on hiring potential, personality assessments, and professional branding (Altenburger et al., 2017; Fernandez et al., 2021).”

“Various platforms were specifically created for different types of self-presentation-such as LinkedIn and digital résumés for professional self-branding, Facebook for personal self-branding and self-expression (Van Dijck 2013), and dating apps in search of partners (Ranzini and Lutz 2017).”

“…earlier works that utilized a lexicon to identify the psycholinguistic characteristics of social media language [144, 158, 186], we used the well-validated Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count 2022 (LIWC-22) lexicon [17] to understand how information workers express their psychological well-being.”

“We identify skills reported in professional platforms/social networks and classify profiles concerning these skills [5, 53, 61], of course, classified by gender and academia vs industry.”

“As a more specific example, resumes for female MBA students were less likely than their male counterparts to fill in free-text summary and job description fields [22].”