At its core, LinkedIn is the suit-wearing, Pret-eating corporate man of the social media world. I don’t enjoy considering the platform as social media because every single second I spend on the website feels like work, which is the exact opposite of what I seek from social media sites. It seems evident to me that LinkedIn is for work whilst Instagram, Twitter and Facebook are for fun. It seems obvious that the direct message features on these apps should be approached in a similar way – Instagram, Twitter and Facebook DM’s are for friends, family and memes, while LinkedIn DM’s are for professional connections to catch up or discuss new opportunities. Yet, clearly for the men who are using the direct message feature on LinkedIn to send unwarranted, flirtatious messages to young women, this distinction has somehow been lost in translation or, quite simply, ignored.
As someone whose Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram message requests are full of messages from men telling me I am “so beautiful” and “incredible”, I am well aware of the lengths that some men are willing to go to to ‘flirt’. These platforms are, after all, social platforms. So, whilst these messages make me feel icky, I let them slide because women are socialised to know that there will always be gross men out there and, despite this being something we should never have to put up with, we are told to simply ignore them.
There is something that stings, though, when receiving this kind of message on LinkedIn. As I have previously stated, I hate every living second I spend on that website, but I make posts and connect with people because I am a young, unemployed creative in 2020. I need to network and build my portfolio. Every time I receive a message from a new connection, I am instantly excited at the prospect of a work opportunity only to be deeply disheartened when it turns out that he just wanted to flirt. It feels as if you’re being tricked into engaging in conversation with someone who has an ulterior motive.
I started politely calling men out on this, sending messages such as: “do you have any writing opportunities for me?” and “what exactly is this conversation concerning? I just realised we don’t work within the same fields”. Each time I was met with radio silence. After talking to a friend about this, she stated that she too had experienced these kinds of messages from men on LinkedIn; they didn’t want to talk about work, they simply wanted to engage in dry conversation, reminiscent of the first few messages that are exchanged when you match with someone new on Hinge. When you’re talking to someone on Hinge, however, you have agreed to waste your time on bone dry messages from sub-par men because that is what you signed up to. Signing up to LinkedIn is not an agreement to keep the company of lonely men. So why are they clogging up my inbox?
As it turns out, men wanting to engage in boring conversation is extremely low down on the scale of inappropriate LinkedIn DM’s. Aashna Patel, a Fashion Buying and Marketing graduate, showed me examples of the messages she has received from men on LinkedIn – “hey, what’s your snapchat?” followed by the wink emoji, and “where are you in London? We could hang out” – neither of which are appropriate messages to be sending to a young graduate on a professional platform.
“This pandemic has hit all graduates pretty hard”, said Aashna. “I’ve struggled so much with my mental health and I’ve never had to work this hard to be a happy person - I don’t need unsolicited flirting on LinkedIn while I’m feeling this way. Something serious needs to be done about this because it’s just not fair to women. We put up with this bullsh*t in bars, on the street, in the tube, at work, on social media - I can go on and on - it needs to stop”.
Aashna politely replied to the man who asked where she is based because he had previously acted as a secondary source for her dissertation and later given her an unpaid internship in the industry. It is impossible to ignore the power dynamics at play here – this man clearly knows that his age, gender, and professional status gives him a level of power over Aashna, and the fact that he had previously helped her out made her feel as if she had to be nice and responsive out of fear that she would lose a connection that had, thus far, been quite helpful with her professional development. “I’d normally put someone in their place, but with him I felt like I had to tread lightly”, she said.
Other women have also experienced these kinds of messages, proving that they are in no way one off, and are a symptom of a much bigger problem. Katie Mulhall told me that “I get messages that are very inappropriate. It makes me feel like men don’t take me seriously because I’m a woman. I have had people messaging me repeatedly, and I have also had men ask me for my Snapchat or send me messages to go for drinks”. For Katie, these messages are even more frustrating because she has recently lost her job due to Covid - “when I get these messages it makes me feel very sad, I put a lot of time into applying for jobs and these are the only messages I seem to receive”.
I thought that perhaps this was a recent problem, brought on by the Covid-induced move from offices to the dining room table, which meant that men could no longer leer over women’s desks and have instead dedicated their spare time to online leering. Unfortunately, having googled “flirting on LinkedIn” whilst researching, I found articles detailing similar messages from as far back as 2017. In the interest of equality, I posed this question on my Instagram story: “are there any men out there who have received unsolicited flirty messages on LinkedIn? I am intrigued to see if this is a gender and power thing (aka mainly men sending these messages to young women) or if young men are also on the receiving end”. This post was also shared by my friend, meaning that it reached a grand total of 1482 followers. The story garnered two responses (both from men), one that read “unfortunately I think you already know the answer – it’s always a power thing because only men are generally this insecure with an ego inflated enough to be behaving with this level of audacity”, whilst the other simply read “wtf, is that even a thing? SMH”.
SMH indeed. Men, please let us further our careers in peace, save your awful attempts at flirting for Tinder, and stop using Snapchat. You’re too old for that.
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