Forget hashtags and professional photos to boost your visibility on LinkedIn – for some women, changing their gender to male on the platform is the key to getting more post views.
“I wish I were making that up,” copywriter and strategist Megan Cornish recently wrote about the results of her experiment.
Indicating her gender as male on LinkedIn’s personal demographic section and using ChatGPT to rewrite headlines and descriptions in more male, “agentic” language was enough to get Cornish’s post views up by 400% within a week.
Filling a personal demographic section is optional, but LinkedIn may infer a user's gender based on information in their profile, such as their first name or the pronouns used when others recommend them for skills.
Cornish’s LinkedIn post attracted over 900 comments, with many women expressing their disappointment with what appeared to be algorithmic discrimination by a leading professional social network.
“It’s 2025, and our best advice for women and other genders in their careers is literally ‘be a man,’” another user wrote.
Some women were inspired to replicate the experiment themselves and shared similar results.
Kamales Lardi, a CEO at Lardi & Partner Consulting, said a drop in her post impressions coincided with her criticism of Elon Musk and other tech leaders.
“It never fully recovered after, and I had struggled to gain impressions since. Now, with this change on my profile, there was an immediate impact,” she wrote in her LinkedIn post.
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The gender switch and change in tone of Lardi’s last post to mirror more “male” voices increased impressions by 421% in a few days.
A LinkedIn spokesperson told Cybernews that the platform’s algorithms do not use gender as a ranking signal, and changing a user's gender on their profile does not affect how their 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,” they said in a written statement.
Men support other men on social networks
These increases in post views and impressions may be a sheer coincidence, or it may be the use of artificial intelligence (AI) that gave a boost to these women’s posts.
Over half of LinkedIn posts have been AI-generated or edited following the launch of ChatGPT in 2022. Moreover, LinkedIn offers its own AI writing tool to premium members, suggesting that the platform may not penalize users for posting content they didn’t write.
While pinpointing the exact cause of why women became more visible after telling the platform they are men, some scientific studies suggest that different genders receive different treatment on social networks.
When researchers analyzed 550,000 Instagram users in 2018, they found that top-engaging male users were far more likely to be suggested to new users and expand their networks rapidly than top-engaging women.
Although women outnumbered men on the platform, men’s photos were more likely to receive at least 10 likes or comments. However, this could be partly explained by men being more likely to engage with other men’s photos rather than those of women.
Men also tend to flag female-authored posts on male-stereotyped topics, such as defense and finance, more often than posts written by other men, according to a 2024 discussion paper that examined the behavior of X users.
The findings on social networks reflect real-world gender bias. Men have long been perceived as more authoritative experts than women, although recent research suggests that this perception may be changing, and women are now considered as credible as men.
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