On LinkedIn, girls depend on pretend mustaches towards sexist bias | EUROtoday

Dor a month, unusual mustaches have been flooding LinkedIn. By discreetly modifying their gender on the platform to idiot its algorithm, a number of customers intend to display a worrying speculation: the skilled community favors, voluntarily or not, male profiles.

The outcomes, relayed on social networks, are complicated. “I changed my pronoun on LinkedIn and, without intervening, I broke my own engagement records,” confides Jo Dalton, entrepreneur and investor in London, quoted by TF1. “So here I am with a mustache stuck on, out of pure scientific interest, to see if I can trick the algorithm into thinking I’m a man. »

LinkedIn denies any algorithmic favoritism

Faced with the excitement, LinkedIn is calming down. The network vigorously rejects the idea of ​​a structural advantage conferred on men. “Our algorithms do not use gender as a ranking criterion, and changing the gender on your profile has no impact on how your content appears in search results or the News Feed,” assures a spokesperson.

Sakshi Jain, head of AI safety, privateness and governance, insists. For her, the fashions keep in mind “hundreds of factors”, together with the scale of the community, the frequency of interactions and even publication historical past. The profusion of content material routinely causes “increased competition” to seize consideration.

“An algorithm is a recipe”

However, many specialists urge warning. The so-called algorithmic neutrality deserves to be questioned. Gaëlle Falcon, professor at Laval University, recollects within the Quebec each day The Press that the tradition particular to the expertise sector can induce unintentional bias: “As the IT sector is predominantly male, they could worth key phrases like efficiency and productiveness. These are attributes that males typically point out of their profile, extra usually than girls. It’s not voluntary. But not directly, girls place extra emphasis on teamwork, collaboration. Men depend on extra aggressive phrases to spotlight themselves. »

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Nadia Serraiocco, professor at UQAM, additionally specifies: “An algorithm is a recipe. On LinkedIn, one might imagine that authority could be an ingredient in this recipe. » And emphasizes that systems tend to “renew cognitive biases. For example, an intellectual authority figure will be a man. » At this stage, can we say that changing gender or adding a mustache has a measurable effect on visibility? There is nothing to provide irrefutable proof of this.

However, rhetoric, lexicon and style of expression could play a determining role in highlighting content. Mass-generated publications, sometimes by artificial intelligence itself, could weigh heavily in algorithmic favoritism. “People are making AI-generated posts and responding with AI. It’s frustrating for some. However, publications generate thousands of views,” observes Nadia Serraiocco.