LinkedIn search engine found to favour men's names

LinkedIn's search engine algorithm suggests male names when people search for female users, resulting in accusations of stereotyping and bias. 

According to the Seattle Times, a search of popular female first names, such as Stephanie and Andrea, were shown the result 'did you mean Stephen' or 'did you mean Andrew'. 

LinkedIn says its 'did you mean' results are produced by an algorithm designed to suggest names with similar spellings based on how frequently names have shown up in past queries. 

The company subsequently rolled out an update to the algorithm that enabled it to explicitly recognise popular names, so that the algorithm doesn’t try to correct them.