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Women are testing LinkedIn’s algorithm by swapping their gender profiles on the platform and seeing how it impacts the visibility of their posts. Katie Rosseinsky explores their claims that the social media site is prioritising men’s voices
Thursday 27 November 2025 06:00 GMTComments
open image in galleryWomen have been switching their gender on the social networking platform (Getty/iStock)
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The LinkedIn algorithm is a mysterious thing. Why, I’ve wondered when perusing the work-focused networking site, is it so determined to serve up inspirational quotes about industries I’ve never worked in, or details of the daily routines of CEOs I’ve never heard of? Why does it simply love to show me posts about what one middle manager’s marital breakdown (or other personal life woes) taught them about B2B sales tactics?
All of these, I believe, are valid queries (and bugbears). But now a much more pressing question about LinkedIn has become a source of debate and investigation: could the network’s algorithm in fact be prioritising posts made by men, making them more visible in our feeds?
Over the past few weeks, female LinkedIn users have been taking part in an unofficial experiment. Fed up with apparently receiving low engagement and reach on their posts, they decided to switch their gender to male; some of them gave themselves new, more masculine names or even used AI-generated, gender-swapped profile photos. The result? Their visibility skyrocketed.
You can trace the trend back to a simple test by entrepreneurs Cindy Gallop and Jane Evans, who asked two men, Matt Lawton and Stephen McGinnis, to post the exact same content as they did, at the exact same time. Gallop and Evans had a far bigger platform than the men, with a combined LinkedIn following of more than 154,000, compared to around 9,400. And yet Lawton and McGinnis enjoyed much higher engagement and reach. So, Gallop and Evans wondered, could the algorithm be working in favour of their male peers?
Since then, more and more women have been conducting similar investigations. Take mental health communications strategist Megan Cornish, for example, who revealed that her post views shot up by 399 per cent after she changed her gender on LinkedIn for a week. That wasn’t the only change that she made, though. Cornish also said she used ChatGPT to rewrite the headline and description for her profile, using agentic language more typically used by men; think along the lines of phrases associated with achievements and assertiveness – the sort of buzzwords that your average motivational LinkedIn bro could trot out in his sleep.
Cornish also used AI to rewrite posts that hadn’t performed well for her previously, again using this more agentic style. And as if to hammer home the point, her LinkedIn write-up of this experiment didn’t end up getting as many impressions as she’d become accustomed to during her week using “bro-coded” language. “I was confused, then it hit me: I used my own voice, not a fake male voice, for this post,” she wrote.
open image in gallerySome female LinkedIn users have claimed to notice an uptick in visibility since swapping genders on the platform (Getty/iStock)Branding consultant Felice Ayling is the founder of Loud Women. Over the past year, she’d heard a lot of stories from women who felt like their online visibility had dropped significantly. “It’s a big issue for women that are trying to build their businesses online,” she says. Over the summer, she ended up chatting to another female LinkedIn user who’d just changed her gender on the platform, to see whether it would make any difference. “So I went in and changed mine. And then I’m pretty sure that within 24 hours I’d completely forgotten that I’d done it, because life goes on. It wasn’t planned.”
When she saw others jumping on the trend earlier this month, Ayling checked her stats, and learned that her impressions had more than doubled. Unlike Cornish, she’d carried on writing her posts in exactly the same way as she had before, with no discernible changes to her style or subject matter. “You can see a sharp uptick in growth over the last three months since I made the change,” she says. She’s quick to note that her test was “in no way scientific”, as “there are so many variables and none of it was conducted in a controlled environment”. But she believes that her findings, and those of other women, present “enough evidence of a pattern that I think deserves to be looked into”.
Nicole Ratcliffe, founder of The Workplace Sleep Coach, had also noticed her LinkedIn visibility drop over the last year or so. Her posts were getting great engagement, “but almost no reach: posts with 10 to 20 per cent engagement rates were being shown to just a few hundred people, as opposed to the daily four figures” that she’d seen before. So when she saw other women talking about their experiments, she decided to take part over the course of 48 hours, swapping her gender marker, changing her name from Nicole to Nick, and adding a “male” profile photo too.
The topics she wrote about, and the language she used, stayed much the same. “I didn’t do this out of curiosity,” she says. “I did it because I’m a woman whose work depends on visibility.”
When Ratcliffe posted as “Nick”, she explains, her reach increased even when engagement was low, in contrast to her previous experiences over the past year. And one of her followers even told her that although he’d opted in to be notified of her posts months ago, “he only started seeing my posts when I presented as male. That was a jaw-dropper”.
open image in galleryDo women have to act like men and start borrowing “bro-coded” phrases in order to be heard? (Getty/iStock)These findings may be anecdotal, but they certainly paint a bleak picture for women online. Do we really have to act like men and start borrowing “bro-coded” phrases to be heard? Do I need to masquerade as a Keith or a Kevin if I want to become a LinkedIn super-user?
Race might change these results, too. Writer Cass Cooper, who is Black, noticed a decline in engagement after switching her gender on LinkedIn, rather than experiencing the skyrocketing numbers that white female users reported. When she made the switch, she wrote on the platform, she was “not stepping into ‘white male privilege’’; instead, she was presenting herself as a Black man, and thus moving into “a category that platforms and society have historically coded as less trustworthy, less safe, or less ‘professional’”.
LinkedIn has responded to the discontent. In a post shared on the company’s engineering blog last week, LinkedIn employee Sakshi Jain said that the platform’s algorithm and AI systems “do not use demographic information (such as age, race, or gender) as a signal to determine the visibility of content, profile[s], or posts in the feed”.
Jain added that the algorithm considers “hundreds of other signals” to determine what you see in your feed, including “signals from your own profile”, such as the industry you work in or the level of seniority you hold, as well as your network and activity. “A side-by-side snapshot of your own feed updates that are not perfectly representative, or equal in reach, doesn’t automatically imply unfair treatment or bias,” she argued.
And in a statement to The Independent, a LinkedIn spokesperson said: “Our algorithms do not use gender as a ranking signal, and changing gender on your profile does not affect how your content appears in search or feed. We regularly evaluate our systems across millions of posts, including checks for gender-related disparities, alongside ongoing reviews and member feedback.”
It’s worth bearing in mind that LinkedIn’s user base is already male-dominated: 57 per cent are men and 43 per cent are women. So it’s possible, therefore, that the algorithm has learned what to prioritise based on how this majority behaves, and might treat male-coded language and behaviour as the norm. Deviations from that, such as more stereotypically “female” phrasing or topics, might be seen as ‘outliers’ and, therefore, not be valued in the same way. Or, in other words, AI is simply being trained on IRL sexism and baking it into their systems. “Algorithms learn from human behaviour, and the kind of content and activity, tone and language it’s rewarding, or it has learned to rewar,d is inherently masculine,” Ayling suggests.
Ayling isn’t advocating for LinkedIn to “upweight all women’s content to balance it out”, adds, but she would like the company to “look into what they could do in terms of giving women a fair shot to grow their business in the same way that men enjoy”. Otherwise, she notes, we might see an exodus of women from the platform. “Then all that does is create a vacuum where we don’t hear the voices we want to hear.”
Ratcliffe, meanwhile, says that she’s still “not going to change my tone or adopt masculine-coded language” on LinkedIn, because her work as a sleep expert “relies on honesty, emotional truth and lived experience”. But she now believes that she “cannot rely on LinkedIn to distribute important wellbeing content. And, she adds, she would like to see greater transparency around the LinkedIn algorithm going forward, because “visibility affects opportunity, and opportunity shapes the world our daughters grow up in”.
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