Are women being silenced on Linkedin?
Kate Merryweather, a Melbourne based Linkedin coach, checks out the claims from women that the Linkedin algorithm is killing their reach.
Linkedin has denied that gender has any effect on post reach
You may have seen a flurry of recent posts from women on Linkedin, saying their reach has tanked and that Linkedin is silencing their voices.
I’ve noted with alarm as women like UK coach Lea Turner have changed their gender from female to male and their reach has soared. In response to Lea, a male, Daniel Hires, changed his Linkedin to female and his reach dropped 20%.
Here in Australia, one of my clients, Bronwyn Clee, tried the same gender swap and her reach increased by 684%. And she posted her usual content.
I find this so fascinating.
AI has been proven to have inbuilt gender and race bias so who’s to say it’s not subconsciously (I get the irony here) still applying it?
If women have to pretend to be men to be heard, that says more about society than software.
Great sound advice as always. It’s easy to get caught up in one factor and think that it’s to blame for poor reach on LinkedIn. But as you’ve pointed out, there can be many factors at play.
Given that we can’t control all the things that LinkedIn does, I agree with you that staying visible, posting good content, and making connections will have better long-term outcomes than trying to keep an algorithm happy – especially given that algorithms change all the time anyway.
I wonder how the algorithm was created. It could have an inherent bias depending on when the original was developed. Women are far more prevalent on LinkedIn now than they ever were at the beginning, so if it was based on their start-up, it may remain not very objective unless they start from scratch.
It’s an interesting question, and I wonder how much it’s influenced by the sectors you’re targeting, and whether they are dominated by women or men. Or whether your current connections/followers are largely of one gender or the other. But as you say, there are so many variables in the algorithm, the only thing we can do is keep showing up (as ourselves) with great content and connecting with our ideal audience.
And the irony of the fact that my newsletter from Mumbrella today was almost totally full of photos of men (on panels, in headshots, etc). This story, quoting a woman, had no photo. I would assume that the LinkedIn algorithm simply reflects what else is on the internet. Perhaps Mumbrella (and other media) could take a look at itself and see how they can improve representation of women in their articles.
Caution against making wild accusations without scaled empirical data, there’s been multiple cases, even one highlighted in this article, where switching from male to female saw rises in reach. Let’s not jump to conclusions