Should Women Use LinkedIn For Professional Development?

I'm taking a break from our deep content, to look at something in analytical, but more practical way. Lately, many women have been asking about the use of LinkedIn as through leadership and business development tool. Most of them are trying to understand the best practices for developing the channel for professional growth. Here's the thing, LinkedIn may or may not be the best investment of your time, here's a look at how to assess the channel, and determine if it's right for you.

I've gone down the rabbit holes of AI and algorithms for years, working in secret, tinkering and testing to discover how I make products, services, events, and content continually visible in the ever shifting landscape of discovery. What I'm finding are the surface-level shifts that your favorite experts and influencers write about are just that – surface level.

There's something deeper brewing in the depths, and I'll pop in here and there to this newsletter to drop knowledge on something that I think is worth your time (and I promise, it's not written by AI). I've been on LinkedIn for over a decade. I never really started using it until a few years ago, my use was sporadic. Even now, I'm a seasonally regular poster at best.

But in the last year, I've been using LinkedIn pages and paid ads for clients because I saw a new shimmer of hope when it came to meaningful engagement and return on ad spend. So I put consistent effort into studying the platform for their use. But what was once brilliant I never published because brilliance once discovered leads to mediocrity (cue LinkedIn Thought Leadership ads from a dude you've never heard of from a company or product you have no interest in).

Now, I'm seeing seismic shifts again. And it's left me asking, "What exactly is the best use case for LinkedIn?" And moreover, is it a place I want to be as a female leader (yep, there's gender dynamics attached).

Before You Look at Mechanics, Look at Your Goals

Before I dive specifically into Linkedin, I want to frame that it's important to assess every channel you invest energy, money or time into as every channel decision is an allocation decision. And every channel you’re investing you’re allocating your precious resources is in developing and deepening in ways that you may not realize. So let’s start with LinkedIn. 

In recent years, LinkedIn is where I’ve seen many women flock to because it was more manageable than having a 24/7 presence on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok. Linkedin offered a more balanced approach to business and personal brand development, and didn’t appear to require as much mental labor. But that’s shifting, and now many women, including myself, find them asking, “What does LinkedIn actually do for my business?” 

When I’m asked this, I find myself asking many traditional business questions and directing women to ask themselves the following questions:

1. Who is your buyer, and where do they actually make decisions? Presence on a platform and conversion from it are different things, especially when it comes to Linkedin. 
2. What does success here look like in revenue terms? Not impressions, not follower counts. I ask them can you draw a direct line from LinkedIn activity to a client conversation, a speaking inquiry, a retained engagement?
3. What is your natural communication mode? How do you actually speak? Translating yourself into a format that doesn't fit costs energy that compounds over time. 
4. How do you learn, and how does your buyer learn? This piggybacks off question #3. I ask, them Do you watch, do you listen, do you look, or do you read? Do you do all four? That says a lot how to show up
5. How many channels can you realistically sustain at depth? Is the channel something something you can and want to use long term? Your Channel strategy has to reflect that.

Overall, I don’t think women should strive to use more than two channels very well unless they have an extremely well-dialed team supporting them who can carry the social load. So now let’s look at LinkedIn in the context of this analysis. 

What LinkedIn Actually Is in 2026

In typical Macala fashion, I fell down the rabbit hole of researching what was happening with LinkedIn. And I found three things that any woman using the platforms need to consider when making a decision how to use the platform, if at all. 

Reach is Down Across the Board

According to research by LinkedIn analyst Richard van der Blom, who analyzed 1.8 million posts for his Algorithm InSights 2025 report, organic performance has dropped measurably platform-wide: views down 50%, engagement down 25%, follower growth down 59% year-over-year. LinkedIn attributes the shift to increased content volume — more posts competing for a shrinking feed. For anyone building from scratch, discoverability and visibility are more challenging. 

Don't Question the Link, Question the Strategy

All of the linkedin experts seem to get hung up on the mechanics of posts, honing in on what influences post reach and visibility. None is more hotly talked about than links. The conventional wisdom is that links kill reach. LinkedIn's own Sr. Director of Product has stated on record — documented by media reporter Matt Navarra — that there is no intentional algorithmic penalty for posts containing links, provided the content leads with value.

What practitioners observe in testing often contradicts that. Rand Fishkin of SparkToro documented in January 2026 that LinkedIn is actively collapsing linked comments on mobile and desktop — hiding them from view unless users actively seek them out. His conclusion is that LinkedIn structurally disincentivizes posts that point traffic elsewhere, regardless of whether that's an official policy. The gap between what LinkedIn says and what creators measure is worth knowing before you build a strategy around either position.

LinkedIn's Content Ecosystem is a Closed System

LinkedIn newsletters and Pulse articles have no SEO value and cannot be distributed or referenced outside the platform. Content published there lives under LinkedIn's distribution rules, surfaced to who LinkedIn decides, when LinkedIn decides. The implications go further than most creators realize. LinkedIn actively blocks external crawling of its content — including by AI tools and search engines. 

That means your articles won't surface in Google search, won't be cited by AI discovery tools, and won't be found by anyone who isn't already on LinkedIn. Compare that to content you own — a Substack, a blog on your own domain, a published article on an indexable platform. If building a body of work you own — one that grows in discoverability over time — is part of your goal, LinkedIn's content tools are the wrong infrastructure for that. You're not building an archive. You're renting space in a closed system.

For me this changes the entire use case of LinkedIn. Having to create specific content, to perform in-platform, in order to build an audience becomes very unincentivized. I’m building a rented house on rented land, where the landlord can change the rules anytime. 

And Then There’s The Gender Variable

In November 2025, mental health professional Megan Cornish published findings from an experiment in which she posted to LinkedIn under a male-presenting profile and compared performance against her own established account. The male-presenting posts measurably outperformed her own. Her research went viral. 

LinkedIn responded. Cornish spoke directly with Laura Lorenzetti Soper, who leads LinkedIn's Global Editorial team. Soper confirmed that gender is not an explicit ranking signal. She also confirmed that early engagement carries significant weight in how the algorithm distributes content.

Cornish's sharper argument is that those two facts don't cancel each other out. Equal treatment and equal outcomes are not the same thing. If early engagement is the primary distribution signal, and a professional culture historically grants more authority to male-coded business voices, then women don't lose at the algorithm level — they lose at the cultural level that feeds it. The machine inherits the bias, scales it, and calls it neutral.

This appears to be a specific consequence for women in relational fields — coaching, consulting, advisory work, healthcare, mental health, education — is that the natural professional voice in those fields is collaborative, nuanced, and relational rather than declarative. That voice tends to generate less early engagement in LinkedIn's current environment. Less early engagement means less distribution. There is no switch to fix this.

Cornish was careful not to overstate it: "I don't think there's a secret 'hide the women' switch buried somewhere at LinkedIn HQ." What she documented is subtler and harder to solve — a system that treats engagement as a neutral signal while operating inside a culture where engagement is not neutral at all.

I’ve seen Cornish’s findings come into play first hand. I dig to surface voices and visionaries that are doing deep work on LinkedIn. And I have to wade through false signals in order to find it. There are many women on LinkedIn working in very nuanced ways within their fields, it doesn’t fit the algorithmic formula, thus making it much harder for their work to be seen and discovered. 

The Situationship with LinkedIn

Where I feel this leaves us as women is that we find ourselves in a situationship with LinkedIn. Honestly, for some the platform is a fit, for others, it is not. 

LinkedIn makes strategic sense when:

• Your buyers are B2B, corporate, or professional services clients who actively use the platform and make or influence purchasing decisions there;
• You're building toward speaking, board positions, or thought leadership in a field where; LinkedIn authority translates to those opportunities;
• Your natural communication register is analytical and declarative — the voice the platform's engagement culture rewards;
• You have an existing warm network that can seed early engagement;
• You can post 3-5 times weekly with genuine substance.

LinkedIn is a harder fit when:

• Your buyers don't make purchasing decisions based on LinkedIn presence, even if they have profiles;
• Your field requires relational, nuanced language that will consistently underperform against current platform engagement patterns;
• You're starting from zero with no existing network to generate early engagement;
• You have channels already working, and LinkedIn would come at their expense;
• You value discoverability that comes from search and AI engines;
• The platform's format and culture are misaligned with how you actually think and communicate;
• And you simply don’t like it (let’s face it – the news feed is a constant nervous system dysregulator).  

My Thoughts on Relational Fields 

For women in mental health, physical health, coaching, grief work, somatic practice, and similar fields — the calculus deserves further scrutiny. These fields depend on trust built through voice, relationship, and language that doesn't perform well against authority-signaling content in a professional feed. 

There are women generating significant income in these fields with no LinkedIn presence. There are others for whom it works specifically because they've positioned their practice around B2B referrals or organizational consulting. The field alone doesn't answer the question. The buyer does. It’s why channel presence and use has to be intentional. 

If You Decide You Can’t Live Without LinkedIn

If you've worked through the goals questions and LinkedIn fits, a few principles hold regardless of algorithm changes:

1. The value has to live in the post. Given the contested and shifting link situation, building content that delivers its full value inside the post — without requiring a click elsewhere — is the most durable approach. This is also, not coincidentally, where the web broadly is heading. Zero-click content isn't a workaround. It's a strategic shift in how you think about what you're publishing and where.
2. Consistency over volume. Posting consistently about 2-3 focused themes over time builds topical recognition — with the algorithm and with your audience. Posting frequently about unrelated topics undermines it. One focused post per week with real substance outperforms daily posts that are scattered or thin.
3. Comments are underused. Substantive engagement on relevant posts in your niche does more for visibility and relationship-building than most people's posting schedule. This is also the most direct way to address the early engagement problem — getting into conversations early builds the network that will show up for your content.
4. Profile and content should tell the same story. If your posts are about one thing and your profile reads like a generic resume, both the algorithm and humans see the disconnect.
5. Measure what actually matters to you. Not impressions. Whether the right people are finding you and the right conversations are happening.

An Example of This In Use

Most of my favorite women I follow on LinkedIn – Jasmine Bina, Amy Daroukokis,  Ida Persson, Emma Grede – have podcasts, Substacks newsletters or YouTube channels. For podcasters or YouTube hosts, LinkedIn posting requires a specific reframe. Podcasts and video episodes live off-platform — that's not changing. So how do you promote these within the context of Linkedin?

First, the LinkedIn post about that episode cannot be a promotional announcement with a link. It has to be its own thing. What you would do is pull the sharpest insight from the conversation and write it as a standalone post and add a video cut to that sound bite (similar a YouTube short) and add it to that post.

Take the argument you made in the episode and make it on LinkedIn in full, in your words, without the listener needing to go anywhere. Let the post be complete. If someone finds the podcast afterward because the post made them want more — that's the right order of operations. LinkedIn surfaces the thinking. The podcast deepens the relationship.

What doesn't work: "New episode out today — link in comments." 

What does work: the post is the episode's best idea, fully expressed, and the podcast is where people go when they want to sit with you for an hour.

The same principle applies to any external content — Substack, blog, YouTube. LinkedIn is not a distribution channel for work that lives elsewhere. It's where the work itself shows up, in a form native to the platform. Everything else is a destination for people who already trust you enough to follow you there. Make sure your critical links are found in your contact info. 

Choose a Relationship Over The Situationship

Here's what I know about situationships: they persist because leaving requires a decision, and decisions require clarity about what you actually want.

So let me be clear about mine:

My LinkedIn presence is fading this quarter — not dramatically, not with a farewell post, just quietly redirecting toward the places where my thinking comes alive. Substack, where I own what I build. Pinterest, which rewards the long game. And real rooms with real people, which no algorithm has managed to replicate yet.

The deeper question this whole rabbit hole opened up isn't really about LinkedIn. It's about what you're building, who you're building it for, and whether the infrastructure you're pouring time into is actually designed to serve that — or designed to serve the platform.

Every channel has a contract buried in the fine print. LinkedIn's says: create here, perform here, stay here. The audience you build is ours. The content you publish is ours to distribute or not. The rules can change on a Tuesday.

Some women will read all of this and decide LinkedIn is exactly right for what they're doing. Good. Go do it with full intention and none of the guilt about not being somewhere else.

Others will read it and feel something loosen — permission to stop translating themselves into a format that was never quite built for them.

Both are valid exits from the situationship.

The only wrong move is staying by default — showing up out of obligation, posting because you feel like you should, building on rented land without ever asking why you chose this neighborhood in the first place.

You get to choose your channels. Choose ones that want you back.