In 2023, 49% of the working population in France are women. But in the tech industry, they only represent 20% of employees. The reason? The lack of visibility of female role models. These models do exist, but they are hard to find. Especially on LinkedIn, the tech industry's favorite platform.

UN Women France and Sistafund, gave women in tech the visibility they deserve to inspire the next generation, by organizing the biggest LinkedIn profiles hijack ever made : InMySeat. The most followed French executives on Linkedin, swapped their profiles with inspiring women in tech to highlight their careers and achievements.

Women hold only 2 out of 10 jobs in the technology sector. Yet, inspiring women in tech exist, and they need more visibility to develop their projects, and inspire the current and future generations of women.

This year’s 8th of March theme was “digital, innovation and technology for gender equality”.

UN Women, a major actor for gender equality in the world, wished to take a stand to support women in tech. Sistafund is a femtech investment fund that highlights companies founded by women, in order to help them raise funds by being more visible.

Our objective was simple: make women in the tech industry and their companies more visible, and reach an audience they don’t have access to.

The tech industry is slowly giving space to women, but stereotypes and clichés still remain. Only 20% of employees in the tech industry are women. The problem comes from afar: only 37% of female high school students plan to go to a tech school when choosing a career. Why? Part of the answer comes from gender representation and the lack of visibility women face in this sector. Young women don’t see themselves represented and automatically think it’s not a career path for them.

Inspiring women in tech do exist, giving them more space and visibility is key to massively change the way the tech industry is perceived.

#InMySeat gave visibility to 30 women in tech from various sectors like e-security, digital recruiting technology, including Chloé Hermary, the 29 year old founder of a feminist coding school, which aims to encourage young women fresh out of high school.

On LinkedIn, women in tech are 5 times less visible than men. So we hacked the 30 most followed men executives' LinkedIn profiles, and gave them to inspiring women. A way to ensure the women and their company were going to be visible by the whole industry.

We asked executives including L’Oréal, Google and Meta, to swap their name and profile pictures with women in tech. Once the changes were made, each account published a post highlighting the career and achievements of the woman in control of their profile, by explaining the initiative and its objective: to overcome the lack of visibility of women in tech in France. All day, their subscribers saw female profiles and their companies appear in their feed… So much that 40 more executives asked to join, and even the President Emmanuel Macron himself asked us if we could hack his own profile… Which we did.

LinkedIn is THE social media of the tech industry. And since women are less visible than men, they are also less visible on LinkedIn. Women are less followed, their posts are less liked, so their profiles are less present on everyone’s feed. If they were more visible, they could inspire a new generation of diverse leaders to emerge.

UN Women France and Sistafund wanted to make existing female role models unmissable on LinkedIn.

So we thought the best way to do it was to hack LinkedIn by giving the women men’s visibility.

The most followed French executives on Linkedin gave their profiles to inspiring women in tech, in order to highlight their careers and achievements.

By synchronizing all of the swaps at the same time, the tech industry’s LinkedIn feed was full of inspiring female role models and their companies.

We contacted the most followed French top executives on Linkedin to ask them to give away their account to a woman role model in tech. Then we found 30 inspiring women in tech and in need of visibility. Each created a company in web security, online fashion, e-education, HR,...

After that, we created matches, based on the companies and the startups expertise, to make sure the executives audience would be interested in the women’s companies.

And on the 8th of March, the executives changed their name and profile picture with one of the women in tech, and published a post highlighting their career, directing the audience to the woman’s actual profile as well as her company’s.

With every post we hijacked the LinkedIn illustration that highlights a new working position, to create a new one which features the swap. Making the hack look native from the platform.

With 7 400 000 users reached on LinkedIn in 24h, the 30 women had 3800% more visits on their profile.

Despite 0€ media investment and production costs, we made the news on national TV and on and offline media with 45 articles in France only about the campaign.

After the campaign launch, 30 more executives asked to give away their account to a woman, including the president Emmanuel Macron himself.

This campaign had real life consequences for these women :

- 9 women met the executive they replaced and signed deals with them.

- Yosra Jarraya, was received by the French Minister of Technology to pitch him her start-up concept.

- Marine Daul Mernier, raised in a few hours the funds she was after for the past 4 months.

- Chloé Hermary, founder of a feminist coding school saw applications for her school multiplied by 5, in 24h.