Want social media success? It's best to be a man |
By Kelly Allison
Something alarming is happening on LinkedIn right now, and it is happening quietly enough that most people haven’t noticed it.
Women are losing their voices on the world’s biggest professional platform, not because we are saying less but because the system has started rewarding one type of voice while suppressing another. The pattern is so clear once you see it that it becomes impossible to ignore, and it is already affecting women’s careers, visibility, confidence and economic opportunities every single day.
This week, one of my posts about gendered bias on LinkedIn (with an AI-generated picture of me as a man) reached well over 100,000 people, thanks to all the women who shared it, and triggered more than 700 comments from women describing the same experience. Their reach has fallen off a cliff. Emotional intelligence is being deprioritised. Posts written with nuance, honesty, or reflection are being pushed down the feed. And yet when men talk about the same subjects, often in the same tone, the algorithm appears to view their language as authoritative and therefore amplifies it.
What prompted my post was the research I’ve been doing into why, at this time last year, my average impressions (views) on a post were around 4 million. Fast forward 12 months, and I’m lucky to get 1,000 views. I am posting about the same topics, same frequency – nothing has changed on my side, but it appears everything has changed with the algorithm. My inbox is full of hundreds of women facing the same issue: their reach has dramatically dropped over the last 12 months.
At the heart of the issue is something Silicon Valley calls agentic language — direct, assertive,........