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TeaHe Linkedin algorithm It is a mysterious thing. Why, while reading a work-focused networking site, I wondered if it was so convincing submit inspirational quotes About industries I’ve never worked in, or details of the daily routines of CEOs I’ve never heard of? Why does this happen easily? Love Show me posts about what a middle manager’s marital breakdown (or other personal life problems) taught him about B2B sales strategy?
I believe these are all valid questions (and bugbears). But now a more important question about LinkedIn has become a source of debate and scrutiny: Could the network’s algorithm actually be prioritizing posts made by men, making them more visible in our feeds?
For the past few weeks, female LinkedIn users have been participating in an informal experiment. Apparently fed up with the low engagement and reach on his posts, he decided to change his post gender To the man; Some of them gave themselves new, more masculine names or even used AI-generated, gender-swapped profile photos. outcome? His visibility skyrocketed.
You can trace this trend to a simple test conducted by entrepreneurs Cindy Gallup and Jen Evans, who asked two people, Matt Lawton and Stephen McGinnis, to post the same content at the exact same time as they did. Gallup and Evans had a much larger platform than the men, combined, with more than 154,000 followers on LinkedIn, compared to about 9,400. And yet Lawton and McGinnis enjoyed enormous connections and access. So, Gallup and Evans wondered, could the algorithm be working in favor of their male peers?
Since then, more and more women are undergoing similar tests. Hire a Mental Health Communication Strategist megan cornishFor example, Joe revealed that after changing his gender on LinkedIn for a week, his post views increased by 399 percent. However, this was not the only change he made. Cornish also said she used ChatGPT to rewrite the title and description for her profile, using agentic language typically used by men; Think along the lines of phrases associated with accomplishments and perseverance – the kind of buzzwords your average motivational LinkedIn bro might repeat in his sleep.
Cornish used AI to rewrite posts that had previously not performed well for him, again using this more agentic style. And as if to illustrate the point, her LinkedIn writing about this experiment didn’t get as many impressions as she had grown accustomed to during her week using “bro-coded” language. “I was confused, then it hit me: I used my voice, not a fake man’s, for this post,” she wrote.
Branding consultant Phyllis Ayling is the founder of loud womenOver the past year, she’s heard a lot of stories from women who felt like their online visibility had dropped significantly, “This is a big issue for women who are trying to build their business online,” she says, Over the summer, she ended up chatting with another female LinkedIn user who had changed her gender on the platform to see if it would make a difference, “So I went in and changed my room, And then I’m pretty sure within 24 hours I completely forgot I did 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 discovered that her impressions had more than doubled. Unlike Cornish, she continued to write her posts in exactly the same manner as before, with no apparent change in her style or subject matter. “You could see a sharp increase in growth over the last three months since I made the change,” she says. She was quick to note that her trial was “not scientific in any way”, because “there were a lot of changes and none of it was conducted in a controlled environment”. But she believes that her findings, and the findings of other women, “offer enough evidence of a pattern that I think deserves to be looked at”.
Nicole Ratcliffe, founder of workplace sleep coachhad also seen its LinkedIn visibility decline over the past year. His posts were getting great engagement, “but the reach was almost non-existent: posts with a 10 to 20 percent engagement rate were being shown to only a few hundred people, as opposed to the daily four figures” he had seen previously. So when she saw other women talking about her experiments, she decided to participate, changing her gender marker over the course of 48 hours, changing her name from Nicole to Nick, and even adding a “male” profile photo.
The subjects on which he wrote, and the language he used, remained almost the same. “I didn’t do it out of curiosity,” she says. “I did it because I’m a woman whose job depends on visibility.”
When Ratcliffe posted as “Nick,” she says, unlike her previous experiences last year, her reach increased even though engagement was down. And one of her followers also told her that although they had opted in to be notified of her posts months earlier, “they only started seeing my posts when I presented them as male. That was a surprise”.
These findings may be anecdotal, but they certainly paint a bleak picture for women online. Do we really have to behave like men and start borrowing “bro-coded” phrases just to be heard? If I want to become a LinkedIn super-user, do I need to impersonate Keith or Kevin?
Race may also alter these results. Author cas cooperwho is Black, saw a decline in engagement after changing their gender on LinkedIn, rather than experiencing the skyrocketing numbers reported by white female users. 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 dissatisfaction. one in Post Shared on the company’s engineering blog last week, LinkedIn employee Sakshi Jain said the platform’s algorithms and AI systems “do not use demographic information (such as age, race or gender) as a signal to determine the visibility of content or profiles.”[s]Or post to feed”.
Jain said 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 your level of seniority, as well as your network and activity. He argued, “A side-by-side snapshot of your own feed updates that is not fully representative, or not uniform in reach, does not automatically indicate unfair treatment or bias.”
and in a statement IndependentA LinkedIn spokesperson said: “Our algorithms do not use gender as a ranking signal, and changing the 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 ongoing reviews and member feedback, as well as investigating gender-related disparities.”
It’s worth keeping in mind that LinkedIn’s user base is already male-dominated: 57 percent male and 43 percent female. Therefore, it is possible that the algorithm has learned what to prioritize based on how this majority behaves, and may consider male-coded language and behavior to be the norm. Deviations from that, such as more stereotypically “female” phrases or themes, may be seen as ‘outliers’ and, therefore, may not be valued in the same way. Or, in other words, the AI is simply being trained on IRL sexism and instilling it into its systems. “Algorithms learn from human behavior, and the type of content and activity, tone and language that it is rewarding, or has learned to respond to, is inherently masculine,” suggests Ayling.
Ayling is not advocating for LinkedIn to “step it up to balance out all women’s content”, but she does want the company to “focus on what they can do to give women the same opportunities to grow their business in the same way that men enjoy”. Otherwise, she says, we could see an exodus of women from the platform. “What happens then is it creates a void where we don’t hear the voices we want to hear.”
Meanwhile, Ratcliffe says she still won’t “change her 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 she “cannot rely on LinkedIn to deliver important wellbeing content. And, she adds, she would like to see more transparency around LinkedIn’s algorithm, because “visibility affects opportunity, and opportunity shapes the world in which our daughters grow up”.