Okay, our winner is mrkgnao! Congrats and once again, thank you all for your replies.

To pull the veil off the mystery, here's what the experiment was all about: the only really important question was the one of gender. The idea was to see if the clothing influenced what people perceived about the gender of the person. All of the models were female, but none were my daughter (she recruited friends with similar body types to pose for the photos). All are aged 16 or 17. Interestingly it looks like she may actually use the results of the other questions as well, so that's cool too.

Of note: she realizes there could be a lot more she could have done to make the experiment more meaningful, but she's in high school and this exercise was a bit of a quick one-off to get a set of results to analyze. The point for her class is more about performing an experiment and analyzing the results than to try to be completely accurate. If that makes sense.

Anyway, once again the GOG forumites pull through to help out when they can. Thank you all very much. :)

And all were female, I'm guessing?

EDIT: And glad to be of assistance~! :D

Glad to help. Thank you for the interesting discussion.

Different types of clothing can also affect the age they appear to be, I am glad we could be of some assistance in this research for your daughter's assignment so good luck to her. Also thanks for the generosity as always Coelocanth another +1 to you and congrats to mrkgnao. :)

Thank you for the fun experiment, Coelocanth, as well as for the prize I won.

I thought the first one was trying to look like a man with the clothes and posture, but the dainty little feet and ankle-length socks gave it away. Was that the intention? I might have been fooled if she'd worn shoes.

I wish your daughter the best of luck with her assignment!

No, it wasn't the intent. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a quick throw-together for my daughter. She had something else planned and it fell through, so she was scrambling at basically the 11th hour tom try to figure out something else. This is what she came up with. So even though there are a lot of holes in the setup and the experimental data, she did get what she needed for the assignment. :)

Then it's all good. :) I did a similar experiment in high school where we photographed people's bare feet to see if people could tell whether they were male or female. That turned out to be harder than expected!

Oooh, cool idea. I bet she'd have gone for that if she'd thought of it.

What about the hair colour? Who got that right?

Congrats, mrkgnao! And thanks, Coelocanth, for holding a cool contest in order to help your daughter out!

It was a trick question - they're all bald.

Hmm and i hinted they might all be female by the hint in the first post... but oh well, it's not important...

First impressions on clothes and body shape alone leaves a lot to be desired... If you put someone in a suit they could be anything, if you put them in ratty clothes they could be anything... So basing first impressions on something you can't analyze except by gut feeling is bound to be wrong...

Taking effectively what would be 15% of your opinion (rich, clean dirty, outward gender characteristics) and making it represent the person entirely as far as you can tell... Oddly not too unlike looking at box covers of games and movies, while it's the theme, genre, system/media, and dev/publisher/director would be the larger determining factors.

Hah, I wanted to change my answer to female for the first picture, but you wanted the first impression. I only realized it was female after I stopped looking at the broad chest.

Nice to know I was right about the gender at least I was 90% sure they were all female, although I was way off on the ages :/ (that doesn't surprise me, as even if I'd had the faces to look at too I'd probably have got that wrong, I'm rubbish at judging ages)

I would be curious to know what colour their hair was... just to see how many people guessed correctly and if you could judge hair colour based on a body shape...