Facebook’s people icons have long suffered from the sneaky sexism of assuming male is default. Just look at the friend request button at the top of your browser: a silhouette of a man with a smaller woman pretty much in his shadow. If you’re on the Facebook app on your phone, however (because it’s 2015), you may notice something a bit different in newer versions: the woman has been moved to the front.
But that’s not all the improvements made to the little characters by Facebook design manager Caitlin Winner. In a post on Medium, Winner details how she was drawn to the gendered design issue when noticing the woman’s icon had a little chip in her shoulder where the man was meant to fit. After fixing it and shifting the woman to the front, she also set about redesigning the icons and adding one intended to be gender-neutral.
Winner wrote,
In comparison to the new lady, the old man icon seemed stiff and outdated so I smoothed down his hair and added a slight slope to his shoulders. In updating the man I discovered the many places on Facebook where a single figure is used to represent an action, like in the ‘add friend’ icon. It didn’t seem fair, let alone accurate, that all friend requests should be represented by a man, so I drew a silhouette for cases where a gendered icon was inappropriate.
A multi-person icon across all uses might look a bit messy, but that still doesn’t mean it’s OK to default to men. A more androgynous icon is a great way to go, especially since depicting everyone as either man or woman isn’t accurate to the real world, either. She also adjusted the groups icon to include varied silhouettes with the woman in front:
It may seem like a small change, but anything to disrupt the subconscious message that women are secondary is a win in my book.
(via The Verge, images via Caitlin Winner/Facebook)
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