Why Facebook changed its friends icon

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Why assume that either of them is a man or a woman to begin with? They aren’t very distinct.

Then again, I usually choose which rest room I use depending upon whether I am wearing pants or a dress on a given day.

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Because while most of us may be stateful bags of meat-logic, you seem to be a stateful bag of logic. And I’m not so sure of the stateful part.

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This seems like silliness to me. So now the woman is in front rather than the man in front. How is that better or worse?

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What’s with the smoothed down hair on the dude? Are they taking an anti-cow-lick stance?

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You’d think in the spirit of the recent changes they’d made to gender options, they’d have 58 silhouettes in some kind of chorus line. Never mind that the hair in those profiles is distinctly waspy…

But that’s what you get when you hire a privileged white female from a top-tier liberal arts school to do your graphic design, I guess.

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She is in front but also smaller, signifying that neither is lesser or in the shadow of the other.

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To be honest, I never even realized one of them was supposed to be a women - never looked close to enough to know they weren’t literally the same icon with one behind the other.

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Phew! And with this, we’ve achieved gender equality at Facebook, in Silicon Valley, and worldwide. What’s up next, folks?

(Seriously, even if this a pretty small gesture, and nearly meaningless, I appreciate the small amount of meaning.)

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So now the guy is in her shadow? Is that better or worse?

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I know that this is your shtick, but really? You can’t understand why some people would presume longer-hair=woman, short hair=man?

Also - count me among the people that never actually looked close enough at the logo to realize that it was a man and a woman.

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What’s interesting is that their new hair could be easily read as either gender – that could definitely be a long-haired guy in front, or a short-haired woman next to him. But something about the bell-shaped long hair and the cowlick in the older version reads very distinctly as male & female to me. Then again, I never noticed the genders of the icon before they were enlarged to this size, before.

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The hair, yes, but the icons themselves still read as distinctly male and female to me (I think it’s mostly in the necks)

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… No. Neither person is in the shadow. That is the entire point of the new design. If the guy was both behind the woman AND significantly smaller, then he would be in the shadow. That is not the case here.

You should strongly consider reading people’s posts before you respond.

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Why ask questions to which you know the answer?

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Let me guess: you’re a dude?

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If that name is Lithuanian, then it’s got a masculine ending, so… probably?

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Good point, the female has a curved feminine neck while the male has a chunky straight neck (with added hard-edged collar that looks like a man’s dress shirt).

No, I don’t think I ever used the word “dude” to describe myself.