Facebook New Friends Icon (Photo : YouTube)
In a recent move by Facebook, it shows its support for gender equality by updating its "Friends" icon with the woman in the front. Though it may not be significantly evident to the eyes, Facebook subtly makes a design change in the logos in support of the fairer sex.
The new "Friends" logo on the Facebook page now displays the woman in the fore with the silhouette of the man behind her, which earlier was the other way round. Correspondingly the social networking giant has also updated the "Group" icon by placing a woman silhouette between two men. In the previous versions, there was a man between a woman and another man.
According to CNN, the Facebook design manager Caitlin Winner felt that the icons demonstrated gender disparity by placing the women silhouette at the back. She therefore, took the responsibility on her to remove the chip off the women's shoulder by modifying the disparity where a woman is placed in the fore in the "Friends" icon.
Winner also rearranged the placement of the woman in the "Group" icon with the woman in the center, and updated the hairstyles of both the man and the woman.
Explaining her stance, Winner wrote in a post in Medium, "As a woman educated at a women's college, it was hard not to read into the symbolism of the current icon; the woman was quite literally in the shadow of the man, she was not in a position to lean in", reports USA Today.
Winner said in her post that she feared symbolism because of the changes that she made, however, to her relief that did not happen. She rather noted the changes were enforced on Facebook with immediate effect and across the globe.
There were significant changes made on the Facebook platform back in 2014, when the globe logo was updated to highlight Europe for users outside America, followed with the addition of a globe focusing Asia as well.
However, this small change in the icon to take the chip off the women's shoulder foresees a crucial step for the organization as the company was under severe criticism in 2014 for under hiring woman, with a hiring ratio of 69 to 31 across the globe.
