"Struggling to build your following on LinkedIn? If you're a female founder, there could be an easy solution: pretend to be a man. That's exactly what Megan Cornish, the founder of Richmond, Virginia-based mental health startup consultancy Therapy Trust Collective, did almost two weeks ago, according to a now-viral post she created on LinkedIn. As a result, her views increased by more than 400 percent in just seven days."
"Cornish changed her gender on the platform in two ways. First, she manually adjusted her LinkedIn settings, switching her answer to its "Which of the following best describes your gender?" question from "woman" to "man." Then, she modified her profile information. "I rewrote my headline, my About section, and several older posts in a more traditionally male-coded, agentic voice," she writes in a Substack post detailing her experiment."
"Before doing so, the first line of Cornish's LinkedIn About section read: "I started out as a licensed clinical social worker, doing school-based therapy. Then I entered the mental health tech space and saw how easily ethics get sidelined when money's in the room. That realization changed my career." Now, it simply says, "I'm a licensed clinical social worker turned strategist who builds and scales ethical mental health brands.""
Megan Cornish switched her LinkedIn gender setting from "woman" to "man" and rewrote her headline, About section, and older posts in a more traditionally male-coded, agentic voice. She used an AI model with a prompt to convert her copy into male-coded language and applied those edits across existing content rather than creating new material. She also produced male-sounding versions of prior posts to compare engagement while minimizing new posts. The profile views rose by more than 400 percent in seven days, suggesting gender signaling and voice affected reach and engagement.
Read at Inc
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