Here's What Happened After This Engineer Changed Her Gender To Male On All Social Media Apps

A senior executive at a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) company recently shared how social media platforms target men and women differently when it comes to auto-generated ads. Karen de Sousa Pesse took to LinkedIn and shared that two years ago, she changed her gender from female to male on all her social media platforms. After making this change she noticed a massive change in the type of ads she got. These changes took place regardless of her search history or engagement on social media.

Karen de Sousa Pesse noted that she began getting a ton of ads related to politics, “MBA and Executive Courses", and content related to finance and investment. She also got ads about “luxurious holidays, sports cars, and buying real estate." At the same time, she noticed, “no more ads about baby products, children’s clothes, and activities to do with the family", “no more ads about pregnancy tests, period material, or undergarments", and “no more ads about finding an expat job as a cleaning lady."

She explained, “Needless to say nothing changed in the way I interact with social media, the change was almost immediate. I waited to see if, based on my history, this would change, but stayed more or less the same."

Commenting on this post, a LinkedIn user wrote, “Really interesting experiment, indeed! Marketing is based on stereotypes. But what if “smarter" marketers started questioning the status quo? I wonder if some of the big companies would be willing to do such an experiment (of marketing to a non-stereotyped audience) and report on the outcomes."

Another person wrote, “Wow, that’s fascinating! It’s crazy how much of a difference the data makes in targeting ads. On the upside, no more diaper ads, haha! But the gender bias in career opportunities is concerning. Did you find the new job ads more relevant to your actual interests, or were they still kind of generic?"

Someone else shared a similar experience and remarked, “On X (ex-Twitter) as well I saw a big difference between the growth and interactions with my nominative account, compared to an alias account for which I have a neutral name – that is probably interpreted as masculine by AI and bots."

It is commonly believed that targeted ads are mostly based on a person’s search history but now it appears, often gender plays a crucial role in sending out ads regardless of the search history.