In Your Face

Analyze profile photos to glimpse who works where.

In Your Face is an attempt to use public data to analyze diversity within the workplace. In particular, the social network LinkedIn includes a huge amount of self-published data about who works for which employer. LinkedIn does not publish demographic information such as gender, age, or ethnicity. However, we can get a glimpse of that information by analyzing profile photos. We use the free Face++ API for this purpose.

Imagine you wanted to tally up how many men vs. how many women were on LinkedIn for a particular company. You could search on the company, then go page-by-page through the results, counting up the number of profiles with a man's face compared to the number of profiles with a woman's face. In Your Face tries to automate that process.

In Your Face is a browser extension for Google Chrome. It would be more practical to provide users a website, but LinkedIn does not provide a search function via their API. A browser extension allows us to examine the photos for any given search. The extensions does not store the data at any time, but merely sends off publicly-accessible image URLs to the face analysis API and tallies the results.

It's important to note that the face analysis API often makes mistakes on individual photos. However, we think that for large enough searches, the results should be representative.