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 fo

See Full Page