How do you use LinkedIn? Perhaps you refresh your profile regularly to make professional connections and update your contacts on your career highlights. Maybe you only log in when you’re actively job-hunting. It’s possible that you’ve never actually got round to making an account.

But whatever your relationship with the professional networking site, it’s probably fair to assume that you don’t use it to chat up men. Who would try to flirt with someone on a platform designed for people to communicate about their careers? That would be inappropriate, embarrassing and entirely unprofessional, right?

Well, of course. But unfortunately, many women still find their LinkedIn inboxes peppered with messages from men that range from creepily suggestive to offensively explicit.

The issue of men using LinkedIn to attempt to flirt with women first reared its head back in 2015, when a British barrister outed an older male lawyer who had messaged her about her “stunning” profile picture. Charlotte Proudman said she found Alexander Carter-Silk’s message “offensive”, noting that she was on LinkedIn “for business purposes, not to be approached about my physical appearance or to be objectified by sexist men”.

Men are still propositioning women on LinkedIn, because nowhere is safe