LinkedIn response
Addressing this debate on the platform, on November 20 LinkedIn published an official note on its “Engineering Blog.” The company said that gender, along with other demographic data such as age or ethnicity, is not taken into account by the algorithm when determining the visibility of content in the feed.
According to internal testing conducted by the company’s engineers, differences in engagement rates of the posts analyzed were not influenced by gender, pronouns, or other similar variables.
The platform has not indicated a specific cause for the anomaly reported by profiles that have changed their gender, but said that the change depends on many different elements: account information, contact network, user behavior and the general dynamics of the feed.
Contacted for further clarification, the company stated that individual experiments conducted by users cannot currently be compared with each other and fail to capture the complexity of factors that determine a post’s exposure on the platform.
A LinkedIn spokesperson reiterated: “Our algorithm does not use gender to determine rankings, and changing the gender on your profile does not impact how content appears in search or feed. We regularly evaluate our systems across millions of posts, including gender gap checks, as well as ongoing review and feedback from members.”
