Want social media success? It's best to be a man

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, authoritative statements that algorithms tend to code as male. LinkedIn’s recent product updates appear to reward this tone while deprioritising relational, emotionally expressive language, which is disproportionately associated with women. Women are reporting reach drops of 70-95 per cent. Some have gone from thousands of views to double digits overnight.

Many discovered that simply changing their profile gender to male increased their impressions within 24 hours. If a platform designed for professional visibility begins filtering content based on who the system thinks sounds like a leader, then gendered design bias is no longer a concept - it is a measurable outcome.

What makes this more concerning is the wider context in which we are operating. Across industries, we are seeing the rise of “bro-coding”, where male-centric behaviours and communication styles are being embedded into the very architecture of platforms, from TikTok’s recommended categories to Instagram’s moderation patterns to the way AI tools respond differently to male and female prompts. If you combine this with the fact that the vast majority of senior AI engineers, model trainers, and product decision-makers are men, it is not surprising that these systems lean towards voices that mirror their own.

Why does this matter? Because professional visibility is currency and women grow their businesses and attract clients through visibility. They gain promotions, opportunities, and recognition through visibility. When the system limits that visibility based on gender-coded communication rather than value, the consequences are not digital; they are economic. They impact revenue, reputation and opportunity pipelines for women across every sector.

As the founder of Culture Queen and Founder and CEO of digital healthcare agency KVA, I spend my life advocating for emotionally safe workplaces. What I am watching unfold online is the opposite. When emotional depth is punished, and assertive tone is rewarded, we send a clear message: there is a “right” way to communicate professionally, and it aligns with masculinity. That is not equality.

The women commenting on my post feel defeated by a broken system. They were business owners, leaders, founders, consultants and creators who had spent years building communities, only to watch their visibility collapse while male peers continued to rise. Many said they felt silenced and irrelevant. Many said they felt foolish for not realising sooner that the system was stacked against them. That is the psychological cost of digital inequality, and it is happening in 2025 on a platform that claims to champion diversity.

LinkedIn has since issued a statement claiming that their latest product update “reduced reach across the board”, but the lived experiences of thousands of women tell a very different story. If your male version performs better than your real identity, there is a deeper problem than an algorithm update. Algorithms are not neutral. They are created by people. They reflect human bias. And when they start shaping who gets seen, who gets heard and who gets opportunities, we need to talk about it.

So here is my call to action.

If LinkedIn wants to remain the home of professional conversation, then we need transparency around how content is ranked, how bias is tested, and how product changes are monitored for gendered impact. We need accountability that goes beyond press statements. And we need acknowledgement that authority does not belong exclusively to one communication style, one tone, or one gender.

I am not going to let this go quietly. I will continue running experiments, continue gathering data, and continue advocating for emotionally intelligent voices to be valued rather than muted. Because women are not asking for special treatment, we are asking for a fair system. A system that does not confuse softness with weakness. A system that does not misread emotional sincerity as professional irrelevance. A system built for all of us, not engineered around the voices it already prefers.

If LinkedIn is reading this, the women on your platform are speaking very clearly. The question now is whether you will listen or continue letting your algorithm speak for you.

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Kelly Allison is CEO of KVA Digital and founder of Culture Queen.

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