{"id":301324,"date":"2025-11-22T11:18:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-22T11:18:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/301324\/"},"modified":"2025-11-22T11:18:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-22T11:18:08","slug":"bro-boost-women-say-their-linkedin-traffic-increases-if-they-pretend-to-be-men-linkedin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/301324\/","title":{"rendered":"Bro boost: women say their LinkedIn traffic increases if they pretend to be men | LinkedIn"},"content":{"rendered":"

Do your LinkedIn<\/a> followers consider you a \u201cthought leader\u201d? Do hordes of commenters applaud your tips on how to \u201cscale\u201d your startup? Do recruiters slide into your DMs to \u201cexplore potential synergies\u201d?<\/p>\n

If not, it could be because you\u2019re not a man.<\/p>\n

Dozens of women joined a collective LinkedIn experiment<\/a> this week after a series of viral posts suggested that, for some, changing their gender to \u201cmale\u201d boosted their visibility on the network.<\/p>\n

Others rewrote their profiles<\/a> to be, as they put it, \u201cbro-coded\u201d \u2013 inserting action-oriented online business buzzwords such as \u201cdrive\u201d, \u201ctransform\u201d and \u201caccelerate\u201d. Anecdotally, their visibility also increased.<\/p>\n

The uptick in engagement has led some to speculate that an in-built sexism in LinkedIn\u2019s algorithm means that men who speak in online business jargon are more visible on its platform.<\/p>\n

Like most large social media platforms, LinkedIn uses an algorithm to determine which posts it shows to which users \u2013 boosting some, and downgrading others.<\/p>\n

In a blog post on Thursday<\/a>, LinkedIn acknowledged the trend, but said it did not consider \u201cdemographic information\u201d in deciding who gets attention. Instead, it said, \u201chundreds of signals\u201d factor into how a given post performs.<\/p>\n

\u201cChanging gender on your profile does not affect how your content appears in search or feed,\u201d a spokesperson said. Be that as it may, the anecdotes are piling up.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt has certainly been exciting,\u201d said Simone Bonnett, an Oxford-based social media consultant who changed her pronouns to \u201che\/him\u201d and her name to \u201cSimon E\u201d on LinkedIn earlier this week.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe kind of stats that I\u2019m seeing at the moment are a 1,600% increase in profile views, which is wild if you think about what social media views look like at the moment, and a 1,300% increase in impressions. Also wild reach stats.\u201d<\/p>\n

Megan Cornish, a communications strategist for mental health tech companies, said she started experimenting with her LinkedIn settings after seeing her reach on the platform decline precipitously earlier this year.<\/p>\n

First she changed her gender to \u201cmale\u201d. Then she told ChatGPT to rewrite her profile in \u201cmale-coded\u201d language, based on a LinkedIn post suggesting the platform favours \u201cagentic\u201d words such as \u201cstrategic\u201d and \u201cleader\u201d.<\/p>\n

Finally, she asked ChatGPT to rewrite old, badly performing posts from several months ago in similarly \u201cagentic\u201d language, figuring that recycling old, reworked content would help her isolate what effect \u201cbro-coding\u201d was having on her reach.<\/p>\n

Things went great. Almost immediately, Cornish\u2019s reach on LinkedIn spiked, increasing 415% in the week after she trialled the changes. She wrote a post about the experience, and it went viral<\/a>, racking up nearly 5,000 reactions.<\/p>\n

The problem was, she hated it. Before, her posts had been \u201csoft\u201d, she said. \u201cConcise and clever, but also like warm and human.\u201d Now, bro-Megan was assertive and self-assured \u2013 \u201clike a white male swaggering around\u201d.<\/p>\n

She gave up after a week. \u201cI was going to do it for a full month. But every day I did it, and things got better and better, I got madder and madder.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not everyone had the same experience as Cornish and Bonnett. Cass Cooper, a writer on technology and social media algorithms, said she changed her gender to \u201cmale\u201d \u2013 and then her race to \u201cwhite\u201d (Cooper is Black). The overall result, she said, was a decline in her profile\u2019s reach and engagement \u2013 an experience other women of colour on the platform have also discussed<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe know there\u2019s algorithmic bias, but it\u2019s really hard to know how it works in a particular case or why,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

While the LinkedIn experiments were \u201cfrustrating\u201d, she said she believed they were a reflection of broader society-wide biases. \u201cI\u2019m not frustrated with the platform. I\u2019m more frustrated with the lack of progress [in society].\u201d<\/p>\n

Users have been rumbling<\/a> about LinkedIn\u2019s weird position as a quasi-business, quasi-social network for some time, ever since the pandemic blurred professional boundaries and injected more oversharing into work. LinkedIn\u2019s occasional tendency to elevate extreme \u201cbro-coding\u201d is best illustrated by<\/a> social media accounts recording the excesses<\/a> of the platform.<\/p>\n

These latest \u201cbro-coding\u201d experiments, however, have their origins in what Cornish, Bonnett and others describe as algorithm changes in recent months that have caused female creators in particular to have markedly less visibility. This led to a series of informal experiments<\/a> earlier this year, in which women and men in parallel industries posted the same content \u2013 and the men got drastically more reach.<\/p>\n

LinkedIn uses an AI system<\/a> to classify posts to its feed, it says, deciding how to disseminate them based on their content, as well as the poster\u2019s professional identity and skills. It evaluates its algorithms regularly, it says, including \u201cchecks for gender-related disparities\u201d.<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for LinkedIn suggested that a recent decline in certain users\u2019 reach came from a far higher volume of content on the network, adding that there had been a 24% increase in comments and a commensurate spike in video uploads in the past quarter.<\/p>\n

Bonnett said the \u201cbro-coding,\u201d in her experience, was on the rise. \u201cYou always think of LinkedIn as being more genteel, more businesslike. It\u2019s not like that any more. It\u2019s starting to become the wild west.\u201d<\/p>\n