OK, what’s going on with LinkedIn’s algo?

Summary

One day in November, a product strategist we’ll call Michelle (not her real name), logged into her LinkedIn account and switched her gender to male. She also changed her name to Michael, she told TechCrunch. She was partaking in an experiment called #WearthePants where women tested the hypothesis that LinkedIn’s new algorithm was biased against women. For months, some heavy LinkedIn users complained about seeing drops in engagement and impressions on the career-oriented social network. This came after the company’s vice president of engineering, Tim Jurka, said in August that the platform had “more recently” implemented LLMs to help surface content useful to users. Michelle (whose identity is known to TechCrunch) was suspicious about the changes because she has more than 10,000 followers and ghostwrites posts for her husband, who has only around 2,000. Yet she and her husband tend to get around the same number of post impressions, she said, despite her larger following. “The only significant variable was gender,” she said. Marilynn Joyner, a founder, also changed her profile gender. She’s been posting on LinkedIn consistently for two years and noticed in the last few months that her posts’ visibility declined. “I changed my gender on my profile from female to male, and my impressions jumped 238% within a day,” she told TechCrunch. Megan Cornish reported similar results, as did Rosie Taylor, Jessica Doyle Mekkes, Abby Nydam, Felicity Menzies, Lucy Ferguson, and so on. Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 13-15, 2026 LinkedIn said that its “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” and that “a side-by-side snapshot of your own feed updates that are not perfectly representative, or equal in reach, do not automatically imply unfair treatment or bias” within the Feed. Social algorithm experts agree that explicit sexism may not have been a ...