Facebook Redesigns Icons To Reflect Gender Equality

Facebook is spending time working on its visual image lately. Days after releasing their new logo – which is not very different than the previous one – Facebook has now joined the fight for more gender equality with new icons that put women in front.

Also Read: Facebook Changed Its Logo – Did You Notice?

Caitlin Winner, a leading Facebook designer, has been working on the redesign of the ‘friends’ and ‘groups” icons to more fairly represent women.

Winner explained on 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.

In fact, better than give an equal position to women and men, Caitlin went a step further and gave the prominent position to the woman in her redesigned icons.

As a result, the friends icon is now being replaced by her new design on the right:

And a similar change was also applied to the ‘Groups’ icon:

#Facebook is rolling out new redesigned gender-equal icons.

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Social media users, who are usually keen supporters of gender equality changes, did welcome the redesign, even if some acknowledge this is still a very small step towards true gender equality and others clearly think this is not enough:

Facebook's new icon makes a BIG statement for gender equality. http://t.co/apkKiKHmd0 pic.twitter.com/FHJld06ms0

— ELLE Magazine (US) (@ELLEmagazine) July 8, 2015

Facebook's gender-equal icons. It's a start but is it enough? http://t.co/DKMJ8zQBt3 pic.twitter.com/I7XIDe6MhM

— TechRadar (@techradar) July 8, 2015