🔗 Share this article

Do your LinkedIn followers recognizing you as a industry expert? Are hordes of commenters praising your advice on expanding your venture? Are headhunters reaching out to discuss collaborations?

Should that not be the case, the explanation could be that you're not male.

The Experiment: Changing Profile Gender to achieve Better Visibility

Numerous women participated in a collective professional network test recently after popular discussions indicated that switching their profile gender to "man" enhanced their platform visibility.

Other testers rewrote their professional summaries to include what they called "bro-coded" terminology - inserting action-focused business buzzwords like "drive", "revolutionize" and "expedite". Based on reports, their visibility similarly increased.

Algorithmic Bias Questions Brought Up

The engagement increase has caused some to wonder whether an inherent sexism in LinkedIn's algorithm favors male users who use professional networking terminology.

Like most major social media platforms, LinkedIn utilizes an algorithm to determine which content appear to which members - promoting some while suppressing others.

Platform Response

Through a company announcement, LinkedIn recognized the phenomenon but claimed it does not consider "personal characteristics" when deciding post visibility. Instead, the company mentioned that "numerous factors" influence how content are received.

Modifying profile gender in your settings does not affect how your content shows up in search or feed.

Individual Results

A social media consultant, who changed her gender identifiers to "male pronouns" and her name to "a masculine version", reported extraordinary results.

"The statistics I'm seeing indicate a 1,600% increase in profile views and a thirteen-fold jump in impressions," she noted.

Another professional, a communications strategist, started testing after observing her reach decrease substantially.

The Process

• First, she changed her gender to "male"
• Then, she used artificial intelligence to rephrase her professional summary using "male-coded" wording
• Lastly, she recycled old posts with similar "agentic" style

The outcome was instantaneous: a 415% increase in reach within one week.

The Negative Aspect

Despite the success, Cornish voiced dissatisfaction with the method.

"Before, my posts were more personal - brief and clever, but also friendly and relatable," she stated. "Now, the masculine version was assertive and confident - like a white male being overly confident."

She discontinued the test after seven days, stating "Each day I persisted, and results improved, I became more frustrated."

Mixed Results

Not all testers encountered favorable outcomes. One writer who changed both her profile gender to "male" and her ethnicity to "white" described a decrease in reach and engagement.

"We know there's systemic preference, but it's very challenging to understand how it operates in specific cases or why," she commented.

Broader Implications

These tests occur alongside continuing conversations about LinkedIn's distinctive position as both a business platform and community site.

Recent changes in the past few months have reportedly resulted in female creators experiencing significantly reduced visibility, resulting in informal experiments where the same posts by men and women received dramatically unequal reach.

System Details

According to LinkedIn, the platform uses AI systems to classify and spread content based on multiple factors, including post content and the user's professional identity.

The company claims it regularly evaluates its systems, including "checks for gender-related disparities."

A spokesperson proposed that recent declines in certain members' visibility might originate from increased competition due to additional posts on the network.

Changing Landscape

According to a tester observed, "masculine-oriented language" appears to be increasing on the network.

"Users typically consider LinkedIn as more professional and refined," she commented. "That's changing. It's turning into increasingly aggressive and less controlled."