Women Rethink How to Be Seen on LinkedIn

“Changing gender on your profile does not affect how your content appears in search or feed,” Sakshi Jain, LinkedIn’s head of responsible AI and AI governance, told The Washington Post in a statement responding to the recent wave of experiments.

Yet the controversy arrives at a time when LinkedIn’s role in professional life is expanding. The company reports that posting on the platform is up 15 percent year-over-year and comments are up 24 percent, leading to fiercer competition for attention across its roughly 1 billion users.

For women who rely on the site to market businesses, source capital or showcase expertise, especially in male-dominated sectors such as finance, technology and real estate, the perception that their voices carry less weight than men’s can feel like a measurable disadvantage.

A Personal Test Goes Viral

One of the most widely discussed experiments was conducted by Megan Cornish, a mental health professional who works with the tech industry. After months of watching her LinkedIn reach deteriorate, Cornish used an AI chatbot to rewrite her profile and posts in a more “male coded” style and switched the gender field on her profile from female to male. Within a week, she reported that her impressions quadrupled.

Cornish later detailed the changes in a Substack essay titled “LinkedIn Likes Me Better as a Man.” Language describing her as a “communicator” and “clinician advocate” was replaced with phrasing about “driving ethical growth in behavioral health” and “commanding credibility” in the market, shifting the tone from relational to more focused on strategy and growth. The content addressed the same topics, she wrote, but in a voice that echoed the business language she saw men use.

Her LinkedIn post about the test spread quickly, drawing hundreds of comments from users who shared their own frustrations with declining reach and questioned whether subtle cues about gender might be shaping how their work is perceived.

That attention, in turn, spurred more experiments as women tried to obscure their gender, adjust pronouns or recast their writing style to see if visibility changed. For women in client-facing fields, where new business can be traced directly to online exposure, the idea that a different tone could significantly alter performance struck a nerve.

What Researchers Say About Gendered Language

For some researchers, Cornish’s experience looks less like a curiosity and more like a case study in how gendered language can shape perceptions of professional competence. Allison Elias, an assistant professor of business administration at the University of Virginia, told The Washington Post that the episode “raises questions about the way that language or characteristics that have been traditionally associated with women are more devalued and embedded into our structural systems.”

She notes that women continue to be over-represented in lower-wage sectors such as caregiving and education, while men dominate higher-paying fields like finance, technology and engineering, contributing to a wage gap that leaves women in the United States earning 80.9 cents for every dollar paid to men as of 2024.

Elias argues that digital platforms reflect those broader patterns. If users carry implicit gender bias into their engagement habits, content that reads as more masculine could be perceived as more authoritative even if the underlying expertise is comparable, she said.

For professional communities that relies heavily on LinkedIn to surface thought leadership and industry commentary, that dynamic could influence whose views help set the agenda on everything from hiring and promotion to investment strategy.

Other scholars see the trend as part of a larger problem of gender stereotypes shaping expectations around leadership and quality. Carol Kulik, a professor at the Center for Workplace Excellence at the University of South Australia, described the online gender-swapping as “one very specific example” of how stereotypes still influence judgments about people’s abilities at work. She told The Washington Post that because LinkedIn is a professional platform, “business language is very male. And that while she accepts the company’s statements that its algorithm is not designed to suppress particular identity groups, it is likely to be sensitive to gendered language.

Kulik pointed to a 2025 systematic review of research on female leadership, covering disciplines including management, psychology, women’s studies and economics, which found that persistent stereotypes continue to impede women’s advancement into top roles. That review, along with studies showing that work attributed to men—from poems and computer programs to résumés and scientific articles—is often rated as higher quality than identical work attributed to women, suggests that assumptions about gender still weigh heavily on assessments of performance.

Beyond Gender: Race, Identity and Reach

The discussion has not been limited to gender. Some practitioners argue that the recent experiments highlight how race, gender and other factors interact in ways that make online bias hard to isolate. Cass Cooper, a freelance writer and inclusion strategist, became uneasy after seeing posts from several white women who replicated Cornish’s experiment without addressing race or noting that their results might not be universal.

Cooper, who is black, decided to run her own test. She adjusted her profile to appear as that of a white man and observed that her reach fell, rather than rose, over a brief period, reporting even worse results when she tested posting as a Black man.

Cooper said the variation she saw, echoed in hundreds of posts and comments from users who reported no significant change in visibility despite altering profile details, underscored the complexity of the systems at work and the risks of drawing simple conclusions.

“The wide range highlights the complexity of the factors that determine one’s reach,” she said in summarizing her findings, adding that “technology is not a passive experience.” In a LinkedIn post about her experiment, Cooper wrote that any conversation about bias, visibility and influence online has to acknowledge that users do not “all start from the same default settings.”

Her comments reflect growing concerns among diversity advocates that metrics such as impressions and engagement, which can affect access to speaking invitations, board roles or capital introductions, may mirror inequities already present in offline networks.

Informal Tests, Formal Systems

For Cornish, the test was never about permanently changing how she presented herself. She said she wanted to connect with a mostly male audience while keeping her own voice, and balked at relying on jargon such as “scale” or “drive” simply to gain traction. After a week, she reverted her profile and posts to reflect her usual style while continuing to ask why certain communication patterns seem to perform better.

Her experiment drew notice from Cindy Gallop, a marketing executive turned entrepreneur and advocate who has been vocal about what she views as an abrupt drop in her reach on LinkedIn this year. Gallop, who has used the platform for two decades to share funding opportunities for small-business owners, particularly women, with more than 140,000 followers, said her impressions “fell off a cliff” after LinkedIn updated the algorithm that classifies posts and distributes them in the feed.

In August, LinkedIn vice president of engineering Tim Jurka wrote in a blog post that the company had “more recently” integrated large language models into its feed-ranking systems to help surface content that is useful to members.

Following those changes, users across industries began trading advice on how to adapt to what many called the “new algorithm” and sharing frustration about seeing lower engagement for content that once performed reliably. Some argued that posts focused on social issues, including gender equity, appeared to struggle more than those centered on technical topics or growth strategies.

Gallop pressed LinkedIn repeatedly for an explanation and was dissatisfied with the responses, leading her to organize her own informal test. Over the summer, she asked a group of contacts, including men with far fewer followers than she has, to publish the same post and compare results.

According to her account, her version reached about 800 people, or less than 1 percent of her followers, while one of the men’s posts drew several thousand impressions and reached roughly 100 percent of his audience and beyond.

Those findings, while anecdotal, have lingered in the minds of women who rely on LinkedIn to talk about workplace equity, corporate governance and responsible AI. Among them is Rachel Maron, co-founder of AI company Trustable, who had been watching the gender-swapping trend unfold for weeks when she decided to test her own profile. Maron removed her pronouns from her profile, changed her LinkedIn gender marker to male and reposted content about AI governance that previously had drawn fewer than 150 impressions.

This time, she said the post reached 30,717 impressions. In a LinkedIn post, Maron wrote that “last week, I removed my pronouns. This week, I changed my LinkedIn gender marker to male. And suddenly, the platform can see me.”

She has said she understands that systems powered by large language models function as a “black box” that can be difficult even for their creators to fully explain, and plans to continue adjusting aspects of her profile to see how different signals affect performance.

For now, there is no consensus on why some users report dramatic gains in reach after adopting more masculine markers, while others see little change or setbacks. Observers point to a tangle of variables, ranging from the timing and frequency of posts to network composition and the buzz created by participating in a viral trend. All of which can influence how widely content travels. What unites many of the women experimenting is a shared sense that in a metrics-driven environment, they cannot afford to ignore any detail that might affect how their work is received.

Those questions are particularly acute in fields where visibility on LinkedIn has become a proxy for influence. In commercial real estate, for example, women increasingly use the platform to showcase transactions, share market analysis and connect with capital partners in an industry still marked by gender imbalances in senior roles and compensation. If certain styles of writing or profile signals consistently amplify some voices over others, the ripple effects could shape who is seen as a thought leader in investment strategy, development or asset management.

The broader research on gender and leadership suggests that the concerns driving these experiments are not easily dismissed. Studies continue to find that when identical work is labeled as coming from a man rather than a woman, it is more often judged as higher quality, and that stereotypes about who looks like a leader remain stubbornly resistant to change.

As large language models and recommendation algorithms take on a bigger role in sorting and elevating professional speech, the question for many users is whether those systems will reinforce old patterns or help create room for a wider range of voices to be heard.