You may not have immediately noticed it, but a big change has come to Facebook, and it's a small step toward making the Internet a more equitable place for both genders.
That little icon in the blue bar at the top of your Facebook page that alerts you to your Friend Requests notifications now has a the female figure slightly in front of the male one. As you may or may not recall, the old icon quite literally positioned the woman behind the man.
"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," Facebook's design manager Caitlin Winner wrote, explaining the change in a post published on Medium Tuesday.
So Winner placed the slightly smaller female symbol in front of the male one. She also redeisgned the old Groups icon, which previously featured a man and a woman positioned behind a man, to now show the woman in front with a male figure and a non-gendered symbol behind her.
Winner was inspired to take on this project after stumbling upon a file showing the female figure with a literal chip in her shoulder to mark where the male figure would be placed in front. After fixing the chip to give the woman two normal-looking shoulders like the male figure, Winner also changed the woman's "Darth Vader-like helmet" to give her coif greater definition. She also smoothed out the male icon and created a genderless icon.
"As a result of this project, I'm on high alert for symbolism," Winner wrote in her Medium post. "I try to question all icons, especially those that feel the most familiar."
Here is a side-by-side comparison of the old (left) and new (right) Friend Requests notification icons:
And the former (left) and updated (right) Groups icons:
Now that's what they call leaning in.
[H/T Gizmodo]
