Eleanor Noyce
Published November 26, 2025 1:10pm
Updated November 26, 2025 1:12pm
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There’s a new trend sweeping LinkedIn – and women are changing their profiles (Picture: Getty/Metro)
Logging into her LinkedIn account, Tamara Tate noticed a new trend sweeping the careers site: women changing their profiles and pretending to be men.
The social experiment is intended to determine whether certain users’ posts are more visible — meaning, how much reach is given to particular profiles by the LinkedIn algorithm — if they are listed as a man.
‘I joined the trend out of genuine curiosity,’ Tamara, a marketing consultant tells Metro. ‘People were saying they had dramatic increases in impressions after switching their gender, and I wanted to test it.
‘I’m always analysing what drives reach, and I also strongly believe that gender shouldn’t influence how people are treated online. It felt important to see what was really going on.’
Quickly, Tamara, from West Sussex, says she saw some truth to what her peers were reporting, describing the impact as ‘instant.’
Within 12 hours, she says that her impressions jumped by more than 1000% — and the views weren’t just coming from her usual audience, she was breaking into new ones, too.
One woman has said her profile reached 220% more people (Picture: Getty Images)
Tamara says that she’s always tried to offer high-quality content on LinkedIn, but has found it a challenge to grow both impressions and engagement with her profile.
‘As a marketer, it’s frustrating to do this experiment, and realise that the quality of your content isn’t always the deciding factor.’
Rosie Turner, who works as a journalist, also got on the bandwagon — and alleges that she reached up to 220% more people, her profile views were up 174%, and her post impressions were up 195% after switching her gender to male.
One expert has said that women should ‘own their professional identity’ (Picture: Getty Images)
Two weeks before, her top two posts received 13,000 and 11,000 views, while during the experiment, ‘Rosie the man’ received 52,000 and 21,000.
When Metro approached LinkedIn for comment, a spokesperson said: ‘Our 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.
‘Our product and engineering teams have tested a number of these posts and comparisons, and while different posts did get different levels of engagement, we found that their distribution was not influenced by gender, pronouns, or any other demographic information.’
‘Women should own their professional identity’
@victoriahboydLinkedIn preferring male? Frigging bet. #linkedin #socialmediamarketing #personalbranding #womeninai #womeninbusiness
♬ original sound – Victoria Boyd
Executive coach Beth Hope tells Metro that while platforms like LinkedIn maintain that they don’t explicitly feed gender into their algorithms, studies suggest that male-coded profiles tend to perform better.
But Beth says that women should take ownership of their professional identity, rather than ‘feel pressured to camouflage it for reach.’
In her view, authenticity helps to ‘build trust, credibility and long-term leadership capital.’
So, if faking who you are isn’t the most authentic way in, what will actually increase visibility on LinkedIn?
‘Real stories, clear insights and content that sparks conversation tend to carry much further than anything engineered purely for clicks,’ Beth says.
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‘There’s a huge pressure at the moment for everything to be instant and attention-grabbing. A quick flash, a viral moment, and straight onto the next thing. In the rush for visibility, we forget what LinkedIn was actually built for, which is genuine connection and long-term career momentum.’
Beth also says consistency is key, there’s no need to post every single day: just one or two ‘purposeful’ posts each week will do far more than trying to appease the algorithm.
‘Share real experiences, honest learnings and thoughtful perspectives, not polished performances,’ she recommends.
‘Consistency is simply showing up in the same voice, with the same values, over time. That’s what builds credibility and long-term engagement.’
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