Do women get more LinkedIn accepts and replies than men?
The face on the profile gets the credit. The list does the work.
Upscale Outreach ·
On the raw numbers, yes: women’s connection requests were accepted 42% of the time, men’s 37%. But sending for the same clients, women and men were accepted at the same rate, and women kept only a small edge on replies, about 7%.
Outscale benchmarks, from 112,945 prospects reached in real campaigns.
On the raw numbers, yes
Across real campaigns, 42.0% of women’s connection requests were accepted, against 36.6% of men’s. Once messaged, 27.1% of people replied to women and 23.9% to men.
- Women, accepted42%
- Men, accepted37%
- Women, replied27%
- Men, replied24%
Case closed? Not quite. Women and men here were sending to different people.
Same client, same list: the gap closes
So we compared senders working for the same client, each against that client’s own average.
Acceptance: women +1%, men −1%. The same, in other words. Replies: women +4%, men −3%, a small edge of about 7% to women.
Now set that beside the senders themselves. Across everyone with 1,000 or more requests, acceptance ran from 18% to 74%. That spread is the list, the market and the offer together. Gender, like for like, moved it by about nothing.
Why the face gets the credit
Everyone has heard that a woman’s photo gets more accepts. The raw numbers seem to prove it. And it’s a comfortable story: it explains a slow week with something nobody can change.
The prospect decides in a second. Who is this? Do they matter to me? Do we know people in common? Whether the sender matters to them was settled long before the request went out, when somebody built the list.
What to do today
- Fix the list first. Acceptance across senders ran from 18% to 74%, and gender, like for like, made no difference to it.
- Compare senders on the same list. Before you credit one profile over another, check they were writing to the same kind of people.
More in targeting
LinkedIn reply rates by country
In Italy and France, connecting is manners. Talking is business.
Italy and France accept LinkedIn connection requests readily, at 60% and 54%, then only 15% reply once messaged. Malaysia is the other way round: an ordinary 40% accept, then 28% reply, so it earns more conversations per request than either.
Read itWhat matters most for LinkedIn acceptance rates?
Who you ask, then who’s asking. Gender barely registers.
The prospect’s job title, then their market, then the sender’s profile. Compared like for like, a typical job title moved acceptance 8.5% either way, a market 6.7%, a profile 5.4% and the sender’s gender 0.7%.
Read itWhich job titles accept LinkedIn connection requests?
The people who sign the cheques accept the least.
Board members and partners accept the most, at 59% and 56%. Chief executives, presidents and finance chiefs accept the least, at 35% to 37%.
Read itDoes company size change LinkedIn reply rates?
Small companies talk. Big ones go quiet.
Yes. 24% of people at companies of 1 to 10 replied once messaged, about one and a half times the 15% at companies of over 1,000. Both accepted connection requests at much the same rate.
Read it