Primal desire for human to human connection? 

While I think gender always has an interplay (ain't that always the rub?), I do think this is a "human being, visual cortex, connection via facial recognition wetware" thing.  An interesting little experiment would be to set up to websites-- similar in as many regards as possible-- & then track click through.  I'd guess that regardless of gender, there would be a clustering around pictures.  There might be a disparity, but then we'd be left to hypothesize about the gender of viewers, the gender politick of websites & web browsing...arg, science is hard! 

Your photo is also the largest clickable item on the front page, aside from, perhaps, your name/title.

And for networking's sake, it's a good idea to include a photo of yourself, so that people you meet at conferences can look you up and make sure you're the person they talked to. Most professor + PhD student website include a photo on the front page.

It might be a carry over behavior from facebook. When looking at someone's profile, the profile picture is pretty small, so I almost always click on it. Maybe it's force of habit for people visiting your site.

When I am reading a book, at some point I always flip to the back to look at the author's picture. I am not sure why! But maybe it's a similar impulse?

It might make sense in this way: narratives, even those with "highly abstracted content," are understood personally, and faces may just well be the first way we understand people.  Sure, part of that (unfortunately? inevitably?) relies on the cultural baggage we like to unpack, the -isms a picture can show, but there's also a wealth of information in the reified body language spoken by a still.  Babies learn faces first to be able to tell at a glance who is friendly (familiar?) and who is threatening, what a smile means, etc.

Lisa, only you can answer the question as to why you added your photo to your website. As to why people look at photos of those who write posts/comments, I'd guess that it's a cultural imperative to check out how females and males look-and not just a cultural imperative to see how females look. People make assumptions just by looking at another person, and/or second hand, by reading another person's physical desription or hearing a physical description of another person.       

Of course, the conclusions that an individual gets from another person's photo has a lot to say about that individual. For instance, the fact that you are a YOUNG White woman helps explain to me certain aspects of your postings. Also, I admit that if I were a student at your college, I would assume that a person teaching a course on Race & Ethnicity would be a Person of Color, although that's kind of wacky in one sense since everyone belongs to a race and everyone has at least one ethnicity.

I think it's interesting that (unless you've changed it since gathering the stats) the most clicked image is on a sub-page of the site and not the one on the front. I have no great insight into this, but it could be that the image on the front has your face large enough to be easily recognized, whereas the one on the courses page (which is showing more clicks) needs a click through to clarify matters. Maybe people are landing on the courses site from a search engine or other link.

It would be interesting to do an experiment that controls for image size, type, position, etc., so that we could understand how much of the effect is accounted for by design fundamentals—that images draw eyes, and images of people especially. A first step could be to see if you can segment the data about those who are clicking the image versus those who are not. Are they disproportionately on campuses? Nearby? Far away? Smartphone users?

After reading this, I naturally had to look at the photo...and you look absolutely nothing like what I imagined.  On the other hand, the more I thought about it, the more I thought you looked like Lisa Cartwright -- most likely because she taught the first critical media class I took ever. On the other hand, I remember Lisa as having short hair, and the internets tell me that she now has long wavy hair...so...um...well, who knows what I was thinking? I think I also imagined you as looking somewhat like my German friend Sophie from high school. 

I add this comment simply as a phenomenological point.  As Iris points out, I often check a person's photo to make sure it really is the person I talked to at the conference instead of someone else with the same name...

I find that if there's an author or blogger I like, I will view a photograph if one is available because it helps with my mental "image" of them.  It helps make them a more "real" person - in other words, the need for facial recognition.  For some reason I find it can clarify my impression of their authorial tone, in the same capacity that hearing a recording might.

I'm sure of course that does not hold for everyone, and that the cultural staple of viewing women's images as commodities and indicators of their worth is also at play.  But how much of it is "I want to see the person I'm reading," "this image is easily clickable," "this image came up prominently in the Google search," or "oh hey a chick writer, she's hot!" is not something I think we can really determine without data.

I used to work for an organization that did a ton of clicktracking studies and people generally tended to click on faces. All the time. You'd get a smattering of clicks on links and a really high concentration of face-clicks. Not just photo clicks, but faces specifically.

The funny thing was one of the pages we did had a photo of a man and a dog, and people clicked on the dog's face all the time too.

I think the basic fact is that it matters A LOT how a person looks.  We care A LOT about how we look, and we care A LOT about how other people look.  We tell ourselves stories to diminish this, because it doesn't seem very reasonable or fair to judge people based on how they look, but this is largely self deception.  That's my perception, at least.

The tags you chose for this post are also interesting. How do you know this about gender, and not (or also, not) about race, for example? It makes some sense to start with gender, but the information visitors are attempting to glean might also be about determining race as well. 

It helps give information about you that you'd otherwise not consider important, mention offhand, or mention out of direct context.  Such as race and gender, which are relevant to your PoV as a sociologist, but not something you'd write in an article.  There might be other information like that that isn't in a picture, but might be in an 'about me' or FAQ page: where do you live?  What is your sexual orientation?  Are you married?  Where are you from originally?  Do you have children?  Where did you go to school and what's your level of education?  Have you traveled?

I have clicked on your picture before; the motivaton was race.

I took a look at your website after reading this, and even though I didn't read which photo was the most clicked on until after I visited the site. I automatically clicked on that photo with the tree. I was happy that the other photos showed you looking fairly natural, and didn't feel an urge to take a closer look. But to be honest, the tree photo looked to me a bit posed and a little awkward whilst trying to look natural, and I wanted to see if you really were sucking your stomach in as there were some confusing shadows and one of your arms looked defensively put across that what has culturally become known as a female problem zone in terms of self image. The other arm looked like it was compensating by taking on a casual openness. I found this a curious thing for someone who writes confidently and critically about female body image portrayals, but also a very human thing. Perhaps I'm reading too much into that pose, I didn't decide that you were sucking your stomach in, but felt compelled to check.

I had to laugh also, because my husband would have probably clicked on the picture to see what kind of computer you were using. Which I confirmed when I showed him the photos of you, and he said that he might click on that particular photo to see what the computer was. 

Sorry, no profound insights into why people click on this photo, just some very trivial personal observations as to my husband and my behaviour.

What people view when they see your page may be determined by left vs. right brain. Studies have shown that artists look at images differently than non-artists (http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2007/03/artists_look_different.php). However, I've seen studies of eyetracking of paintings by Renaissance artists that suggest that human faces grab and hold the eye, and that the eye will return to faces after scanning other details.

Not sure this is strictly related to gender: males upload their pictures to their blogs too. I know the stats say women upload more pictures on facebook and spend more time managing their photos, so there may be something to be said about why you have four pictures on your blog, and I only have one profile picture on mine -- but I am just as deliberate  (perhaps more) in ensuring the image presented is the one I wish to project to my audience. Effective Image management requires an image to be presented....I think Irving Goffman's work on the presentation of self is the relevant source here -- the clicking stats just confirm that the rest of us are complicit in allowing others to present themselves to us. Or something like that.

What has been the trend since you brought it up here?

I agree with EMB that it is the nature of the photo - I looked at all four and it was the one with a tree that I felt the need to see larger.  If visitors were enlarging all photos at the same rate, I'd feel safer assuming it was about appearance.  What I think is actually happening, though, is not that you are so small in the photo, but that the tree is dark and very near you, also dark - it's hard to visually ascertain the photo in the small size.  That's my informal survey.

I wouldn't make too much of it and you're right not to really think about it. Maybe there is some instinct to put a face to a person you're interacting with. There was a project recently where a photographer did a series of portraits of modern philosophers and I really enjoyed putting a face to the work I had read. So maybe there is something to seeing who you're interacting with or reading. As far as the stats seem to show in your case, however, people are still at least interested in your work. 

I actually have a similar experience on my blog. Lots of my writing is peppered with copious links but by far the most clicked link or item is a picture of Jon Hamm as Don Draper that accompanied an article about the character that a friend, a Gender Studies prof, guest-blogged for me. It's probably pretty obvious though why people are enlarging Don Draper pics. Either way, people seem to like enlarging pics. I'm pretty sure when first viewing someone's Facebook page, the first thing the visitor does is enlarge the profile pic. 

Part of the fascination might be your recent revelation that you've struggled with body image issues. I looked for your photo because of that; it's comforting to see that normal, healthy people can do that (in fact most normal, healthy people probably do). And you're a normal, healthy person. Thank you for confessing that.

I might suggest that people are looking at the image out of sexual attraction. I get tons of hits on my blog from people looking for porn (it has nothing to do with porn). I can imagine people turning up the image in a search for something else and just clicking on it because it shows someone female.

So the human brain has a ridiculous amount of subsystems available for analyzing faces. We're visual creatures. Would be a waste to not use 'em.

For a Sociologist and a prolific writer on the media and body image, I find it interesting that the first image on your site is quite photoshopped.

I can't imagine what this has to do with "gender" in the first place.  We look at pictures of authors.  Perhaps to break up the mass of text-only interraction in a book or essay, perhaps out of some probably silly notion that we are thereby forming some kind of connection with the author.  I was just thumbing through one of George R.R. Martin's novels this weekend--my wife's given in to all the media attention and started reading them--and found myself looking at his portrait on the inside cover.  Probably because I had in my hands eleven hundred pages of text and one photograph.

I just clicked on your picture b/c of this article!  =D  Great blocking; I especially like the use of the arch in the tree branch.  Props to the photographer. 

And now we all have to look at it!

Whoever retouched your picture is not very good at it. Your eyes are almost phosphorescent and the left eye is too bright for the angle it is at. 
End of designer comment.

Just so you know, while viewing your site just now on an iPad (I read SocImages via FlipBoard), I managed to accidentally "click" (tap) on your photo while trying to navigate! It hadn't even loaded enough for me to realize what I'd tapped until the page of mostly text gave way to a huge photo.

I doubt that most of your traffic is on touch interfaces, but maybe it contributes?

There's probably an element of curiosity about you, I think. If I clicked the image on the home page or the subpage, I'd hope to be taken to an "About" page, rather than a larger view of the image.

My thought (as a web designer) would be to remove the links - as there's a big temptation to click on such a large element - or to link them to another page, to make them more useful. Unless you especially want people to view the full size images, of course!