Like several other companies in the Silicon Valley, Facebook was recently in news for the under-representation of women in its workforce, but looks like the social media giant is now keen to rework its image as Facebook features new icons for friends that propagate the cause of feminism.

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According to The Verge, Facebook seems to have revamped its friendship icons. The new designs introduced recently are giving more importance to the virtue of feminism, with the girl taking the front seat as opposed to the previous version where lady's shoulder was chipped off and the guy was in the front.

While the previous logo gave the impression of the woman being in the shadow of the man, the new design gives more importance to the female. The design change was introduced by Facebook Design Manager Caitlin Winner.

This is not the only icon on Facebook where the women will now be in the front as even the group icon has been redesigned to give more importance to the feminine participation.

In her statement, Weiner said that while studying the symmetry of the logos, she noticed how the woman was not represented properly. During conceptualization and ideation, Weiner designed several options, and one of them included a double silhouette where the man and the woman had equal representation.

After abandoning several options, she finalized the present design giving both males and females equal representation; however, this is not the only change in the icons as Weiner has also given the female icon a Darth Vader-like appearance with a smarter haircut and a more sleek appearance.

Additionally, Weiner has also created a non-gendered icon for situations where previously users could only see a male icon. These icons were then passed on to the front-end Engineer Matt Sain, as confirmed by Gizmodo. Soon, the icons were up and circulated across users all over the globe.

As of now, the users can see the new icon on their mobile apps, wherein analysts are calling this a small yet important victory for feminism in the virtual world.

TagsFacebook updates, Facebook Features