Foreign Affairs

Woman Pretended To Be Man Online To Fight Sexual Harassment On LinkedIn

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An Australian woman pretended to be a man online in order to fight the sexual harassment she experienced on LinkedIn, she told Whimn Tuesday.

Andrea Myles, the CEO of China Australia Millennial Project (CAMP), replaced her LinkedIn profile photo with an image of a middle-aged man she named “Andrew Myles” in order to combat the sexual harassment she was experiencing on the job networking site, she told Whimn. Myles claimed she finally got fed up after getting a few messages from men sending her inappropriate messages through LinkedIn each month. “I just thought, ‘Bugger this, I’m just going to change my profile to male,'” Myles recalled.

“If we think about LinkedIn as a proxy for an online workplace — if somebody bails you up and says, ‘That dress looks really good on you,’ you’ve got Human Resources to go and have a chat to but on LinkedIn you don’t. I have reported every single person who has sent me something dodgy on LinkedIn and nothing ever happens,” Myles said.

“There are the opportunities you know you miss out on and then there are the opportunities that just never quite come your way — so you can’t quite quantify those ones. Being a CEO, you’re often fumbling along in the dark along a wall and trying to find a door to go into. My perspective is that for female CEOs, we often get more wall than door and for male CEOs, there are just often more doors open,” the CEO added.