If you’ve ever wondered why your posts on LinkedIn aren’t getting engagement, it might not be because you’re posting at the wrong time of day, or because your content is boring. It might be because you’re not a man.
Over the last few weeks, dozens of women have joined a global experiment: changing their gender from ‘female’ to ‘male’ on LinkedIn to see whether it boosts their reach and visibility. Some even reworded their profiles, embedding male-coded words like “drive”, “transform” and “accelerate,” — otherwise known as “bro-coding” — to see if it made a difference, as reported by The Guardian.
While the results are anecdotal rather than scientifically verified, the pattern has been consistent enough to prompt widespread discussion among women on the platform.
In a blog post, LinkedIn acknowledged it had received questions on the matter and said it does not use demographic information such as age, race or gender to decide the performance of content on the platform. It uses “hundreds of signals” from a user’s own profile, such as their position or industry, network and level of activity.
For founders, visibility on LinkedIn is crucial for advertising their startups, attracting investors and finding talent, so a lack of visibility on the platform could have real business consequences.
Female founders are already at a disadvantage when it comes to VC funding. In 2024, European startups with at least one female cofounder raised €6.56bn, just 12% of the total VC capital raised last year.
Chelsea Ranger, chief business officer of Possibia, is among the women who changed her gender on the platform (notably she retained her name, pronouns and usual profile picture). In two weeks her impressions on LinkedIn were up by 914%, and her engagement increased by 1100%, she tells Sifted.
Ranger hasn’t personally felt “invisible” on LinkedIn, as many other women she’s spoken to and seen posts from report, but finds it concerning that women’s voices aren’t being heard.
“Visibility is what offers you leadership. That’s what gives you the voice and the platform in order to stand up as a leader. And if women are downplayed in that sense, we lose that opportunity in many ways,” says Ranger, adding that she has since removed demographic information from her profile.
Kamales Lardi, CEO of Lardi & Partner Consulting, a company helping other companies implement AI, says when she started her business 15 years ago as a solo entrepreneur and a newcomer to Switzerland, LinkedIn was indispensable for gaining traction and visibility.
That many women are struggling to get engagement is impacting female-led businesses and their income streams, she says.
In the last year, Lardi has noticed a significant drop in engagement and impressions on her posts on LinkedIn, despite having more than 17k followers. “My assumption earlier this year was that I was shadow-banned simply because I had been very (publicly) critical of tech billionaires,” she says.
Lardi’s experience echoes accounts from other female creators, who say recent changes to LinkedIn’s algorithm have reduced their visibility on the platform, leading to waves of experiments by women on the network including Cindy Gallop, founder of MakeLoveNotPorn.
After Lardi changed her gender on LinkedIn, her impressions increased by 421% in just a few days, she says.
The clear uptick in engagement has led some women to speculate that LinkedIn’s algorithm, which decides which posts users see, favours content from men.
A Linkedin spokesperson told Sifted that “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.”
Lardi says many women have seen a similar jump in engagement after changing their gender, while others haven’t. Some men have also switched their gender to ‘female’ and seen a drop in engagement, though others reported little to no change.
Yvonne Jackson, founder and AI product manager at NoelleOS, wrote on LinkedIn that the debate is more nuanced than gender, and requires a conversation about intersectionality.
“Some of us can switch gender and see a jump. Some of us can switch gender and watch our reach drop. Some of us remove ethnicity and that is what finally changes the system’s response. Which I did and got an immediate lift. That’s the reality,” she wrote.
Lardi says there are “significant outliers that warrant a governance audit,” calling on LinkedIn to provide more transparency on how its algorithm works. “Most companies implementing algorithms don’t know the inner workings of their own systems, and that is one of the biggest governance challenges we face.”
LinkedIn, she says, is a reflection of social inequalities that already exist. Bias exists in every human, and therefore it exists in the technology that we build. The first step, says Lardi, is to be aware of that fact.
“I come from the tech industry. I'm a female leader, a person of color. I've seen all of the biases that exist in leadership. But what I don't expect is for disparities in society to be built into these systems,” says Lardi. “They have an option to be built differently.”
For many, the various experiments taking place on LinkedIn are just another reminder that a diverse range of identities need to have a seat at the table in developing the technologies we rely on.
Though the age-old question remains: how can women get their voices heard, not just online, but in broader society?
“The majority of women I know are doing the work. They’re actively showing up to apply for the jobs. They’re actively putting themselves in vulnerable positions and speaking about their experience,” says Ranger.
“I think the biggest advice I can give is: if you have already reached a position of seniority or visibility, let the ladder down for the women behind you. Find ways to mentor and lift them up — and continue to be brave and loud, even when you feel hesitant.”
And for men? “Stop seeing this as a woman’s problem. This is a societal issue and it embeds itself in every single aspect of life, including our long term health and wellness,” adds Ranger.
As ever, the LinkedIn debate is also a rallying cry to get more women into VC, to become angel investors and to lead companies. “All of these directly translate into what the societal output is,” says Ranger.
