Survey: Over 90% of women have received inappropriate messages on LinkedIn

A study surveying users of the professional networking site, LinkedIn, reports that over 90% of women on the platform say that they have received romantic advances or inappropriate messages at least once.

For LinkedIn users, job offers can sit alongside unwanted sexual advances in their inboxes. Or so suggest the findings of a study* polling over 1,000 women active on LinkedIn in the United States, and conducted by Passport-photo.online.

According to the study, “about 91% of female LinkedIn users have received romantic advances or inappropriate messages at least once”. And of these messages, almost 31% are propositions for romantic or sexual encounters.

Some 30% of the women surveyed also report receiving requests for personal or intimate information, 14% have received unwanted compliments or flattery, and nearly 12% have received unsolicited explicit content.

Most (30.23%) said that they received such messages on a monthly basis, but almost 25% said they received them daily.

Report and block

So how do the women concerned react to this behaviour? For the most part, they don’t let it pass without taking action. The survey reports that 43.44% reply to the sender to point out that their message was inappropriate. Almost 23% of women prefer to ignore or delete such messages, while 17.21% use the platform’s functions to report and block the people who send them.

Although that percentage might seem relatively low, 43.24% of female users surveyed nevertheless say that they have already reported and blocked a user for sending romantic or inappropriate messages, multiple times.

Unfortunately, this kind of message has a direct impact on women’s presence on the professional social network. Although women feel more annoyed (14.75%), indifferent (13.42%) and confused (13.22%) than “violated” (10%) by such messages, it still leads many of them to reduce their presence on the platform.

Some 74.18% of women polled have limited their activity on LinkedIn due to receiving romantic advances or inappropriate messages – a situation that further accentuates their lack of visibility in the professional sphere.

Faced with this worrying and recurring behaviour, the users surveyed felt that the LinkedIn platform should increase awareness and education about more appropriate behavior (39.04%), implement stricter guidelines and policies (25.61%) or even ban users who repeatedly send inappropriate messages (22.34%). – AFP Relaxnews

*An online survey of 1,049 US female LinkedIn users who log on to the platform at least once a week via a bespoke online survey tool in May 2023.