Women don fake mustaches in LinkedIn ‘gender bias’ fight

WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — Flipping their gender setting to “male” and even posting photos with fake mustaches, a growing number of women on LinkedIn have posed a provocative challenge to what they allege is an algorithmic bias on the platform.

Last month, female users began claiming that adopting a male identity had dramatically boosted their visibility on the professional networking site, setting off a chain reaction.

Women adopted male aliases — Simone became Simon — swapped their pronouns for he/him, and even deployed artificial intelligence (AI) to rewrite old posts with testosterone-laden jargon to cultivate what they describe as an attention-grabbing alpha persona.

To add a dash of humor, some women uploaded profile photos of themselves sporting stick-on mustaches.

The result?

Many women said their reach and engagement on LinkedIn soared, with once-quiet comment sections suddenly buzzing with activity.

“I changed my pronouns and accidentally broke my own LinkedIn engagement records,” wrote London-based entrepreneur and investor Jo Dalton, adding that the change boosted her reach by 244 percent.

“So here I am, in a stick-on moustache, purely in the interest of science to see if I can trick the algorithm into thinking I am a man.”

LinkedIn rejected accusations of in-built sexism.

“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,” a LinkedIn spokesperson told Agence France-Presse.

However, women who saw their engagement spike are now calling for greater transparency about how the algorithm -- largely opaque, like those of other platforms -- works to elevate some profiles and posts while downgrading others.