LinkedIn has added “stay-at-home mom” and other role titles to its public resume function in a move to better reflect high numbers of people – particularly women – who have left the workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Options added this week also include “stay-at-home dad” and “stay-at-home parent,” and the Microsoft-owned platform has also removed the requirement that resume entries be linked to a specific employer.
The move comes following a post on Medium’s ‘Better Marketing’ website that criticized LinkedIn’s lack of flexibility on its language as biased against women who have left the workforce.
Jobs data shows that the pandemic has hit women much harder than men.
As part of its larger profile redesign, the company on Tuesday also unveiled several other changes, including a dedicated, formal field for LinkedIn users to add their gender pronouns to their profiles. Such a pronoun entry has also been long requested by many LinkedIn users, who until now have found informal workarounds (like adding their pronouns to the end of their names).
“Pronouns are a core part of our identity, and how we want to present ourselves—and within the jobs marketplace, we believe that clarity about someone’s gender pronouns is very, very important,” Ayenew says.
He adds that making all of these changes to LinkedIn’s profiles “has taken more time than we would like” because of the degree of technology redesign it has required. “The profile is very, very core and foundational to our entire ecosystem—so we have to be very careful and deliberate about the changes we make,” he says. “We are finally getting to it—and we’re excited to be rolling it out.”
