Women don fake mustaches in LinkedIn ‘gender bias’ fight – Canadian Affairs

Photo by Zulfugar Karimov on Pexels.com Read: 2 min 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 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 per cent. “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.”
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