Scroll your LinkedIn feed this week, and you might see some unusual experiments going on. Women have been changing their names (from “Lucy” to “Luke”), adding a mustache to a profile photo, and changing the gender on their profiles. Anecdotally, some of these LinkedIn sleuths found some stark results.
Lucy Ferguson, who changed her name for 24 hours, said impressions of her content went up 818% compared to the prior seven days. Rosie Taylor changed her gender settings to male and, with no other changes, says her people reached stat rose 220%. Cass Cooper said she tried it out—and her own visibility dropped, which she attributed to the intersection of gender and race as her profile now registered her as a Black man.
LinkedIn was, unsurprisingly, concerned about this trending topic. Sakshi Jain, the platform’s head of responsible AI and AI governance, published a blog post responding to the trend. She said that LinkedIn’s “algorithm and AI systems do not use demographic information (such as age, race, or gender) as a signal to determine the visibility of content, profile, or posts in the feed.” Instead, she wrote, signals including position, industry, network, and activity are used to determine what content shows up in the LinkedIn feed. And she argued that side-by-side snapshots are not a reliable measure, as volume of content shared on LinkedIn grows exponentially.
LinkedIn’s algorithm is no doubt complex, and if the platform is outright saying it does not use gender, race, or age as signals to determine the visibility of content, that’s probably true. Jain’s post also outlined ways LinkedIn tries to ensure bias is not baked into new products or features before they launch. If it’s relying on signals like position and network, of course men have an advantage due to systemic bias beyond one tech platform. If men have a leg up in the business world, they’d have one on the business social media platform.
Still, we know unconscious bias seeps into tech platforms, despite the best efforts of many passionate advocates in the tech industry. And in the AI era, the potential for bias is even more significant, from AI hiring software to content moderation; LinkedIn (owned by Microsoft) is certainly aware of that, given its response to this conversation came from its head of responsible AI.
Have any of you participated in the trend? Have you changed your profile or gender settings on LinkedIn? What did you find? Did it seem as if your reach increased, or did you see any other changes? I’d love to hear about your experience—send a note to my email below (it may be in a future newsletter).
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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PARTING WORDS
"I am not concerned about an AI bubble. I do think that those who are thinking that way are a bit too shortsighted. They don’t really see the power of the technology."
— AMD CEO Lisa Su