Karen de Sousa Pesse, an engineer from Belgium, recently took to LinkedIn to share her surprising experience after changing her gender to male on social media platforms. Pesse detailed how her social media feeds dramatically shifted following this change, providing a revealing look into the impact of gender on targeted advertising.
Before the change, Pesse's feeds were filled with ads for baby products, children's clothes, and family activities. However, after switching her gender to male, these ads were replaced with those promoting MBA programs, executive courses, and career advancement opportunities. Pesse noted a complete disappearance of ads targeting roles typically associated with women, such as expat jobs for cleaning ladies. Instead, she observed an uptick in ads for jobs like street cleaners and bus drivers, as well as content focused on managing finances, investment, and politics.
Pesse emphasized the immediacy of the change, stating, “Needless to say that 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.”
Her post quickly went viral, sparking a wave of reactions from netizens. Many shared their own experiences and thoughts in the comments section.
One user wrote, “I did this too, but it wasn’t exactly an experiment :-). What I can add to this list: a massive amount of ads about working out, growing muscles, clothes that make you look more muscular, soaps that smell nice to women. (Body positivity doesn’t really exist for men yet). And a lot of ads about meals that are healthy but don’t require any cooking skills.”
Another commenter highlighted, “I once compared my TikTok feed with that of my teenage daughters. Huge difference too. Algorithms are biased.”
A different perspective was offered by someone who said, “The ads shown are more a function of one’s browsing history than just gender. I am a woman of the same age as you and I don’t get any of these ‘stereotypical’ ads so not sure one can make sweeping statements like this only based on own experience.”
Another individual shared, “I did that years ago. Started getting those ads for ‘young singles in my area’ and gym ads.” Meanwhile, someone humorously asked, “Which gender do I need to change to in order not to see any ads at all?”
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