From Wogrammers to new 'friend' icon: Here’s how some Facebook employees are promoting gender equality

On 26 August, also celebrated as Women’s Equality Day in America, Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg posted on Facebook:   “I want us to believe we can become those women. Every day should feel like Women’s Equality Day.” August 26 is the day American women earned the right to vote, 95 years ago.

Sandberg added, “The day celebrates how far women have come — and reminds us to keep striving until we reach true equality.”

While that makes a ’like’-able Facebook post, very few people are known to follow up their social media claims with action in real life. However, you can’t level that allegation against Sandberg, or the company she works for.

Here’s a look at the some of the most impressive things Facebook employees, including Sandberg, have done to promote gender equality.

Wogrammers

A National Public Radio repor t in 2013 stated that there were only about 20% female computer programmers in US. And US is the home of tech companies. The gender disparity in the field of computer science and programming is not uncommon.

The dismal number of women in tech also breeds regressive and at time, offensive stereotypes about women working in the field.  To combat this, two female engineers at Facebook, Erin Summers & Zainab Ghadiyali, established ‘Wogrammers’, a cooler way of saying woman programmers. The initiative aims to battle sexism and keep the focus on their talents, than their being ‘woman programmers’.

“As software engineers, we get asked a lot about what it’s like to be a woman in tech. We would much rather be asked about our technical accomplishments and the technology we’ve built. We decided to take control and do something about it, and that’s how wogrammer was born,” reads the description on the official website.

Wogrammer has done its share by showcasing the stories of various innovative breakthroughs by women all over the world. The (w)programme (pun intended) has been around for a year and interviewed around 50 engineers. Sandberg herself has been very supportive of the initiative. “Thank you Erin and Zainab for showing us what women engineers look like, and for inspiring the next generation of women in technology,” Sandberg wrote in a Facebook post.

Friends icon

Remember the time when the friend request icon on Facebook was a spiky-haired man in front with a ‘Darth Vader helmet’ clad woman, small in size behind him? Well earlier this year, we got rid of that subtly sexist icon for good, thanks to the initiative of one female designer at Facebook.

In July 2015, Caitlin Winner redesigned the icon to make both genders equal. In a long blog posted on Medium , Winner explained how the woman being smaller and behind bothered her and she decided to change it because symbols matter. In the process she also updated the ‘Add Friend’ icon which only had a man’s silhouette and the ‘Group’ icon which had the woman behind.

It may have been a small step at Facebook, but it was strong nod towards gender equality worldwide considering Facebook is the largest online network in the world used by millions of people from all walks of life. Personally, we much prefer this new, gender-equal icon because it looks so much cleaner and appealing.

Lean In

If you’ve been following Sandberg’s regular updates on Facebook, you’ll notice #LeanIn is what she ends most of her posts with. Lean In is her own women empowerment movement which is focused on encouraging women to pursue their ambitions, and changing the conversation from what we can’t do to what we can do, according to the official website.

In 2015, on the two year anniversary of Lean In, Sandberg’s LeanIn.Org, launched a new campaign called #LeanInTogether that encourages men to help women in the fight for gender equality, similar to the UN campaign #HeForShe. “In order for women to be seen as leaders, we’re also going to have to support men as caregivers. Both sides of these coins work together, you can’t really have one without the other,” Sanberg was quoted as saying by Huffington Post.

Does Facebook reflect its employees’ sentiments?

However, despite all the innovative efforts to address the gender disparity, the workforce at Facebook does not reflect this. According to Facebook’s 2015 diversity report , 68 percent of global employees are male. In senior leadership positions, a large 77 percent are male and the divide is the worst in tech with 84 percent males.

This has invited criticism online with calls to ‘practice what you preach’. For all the programmes, Facebook’s policy will only count if the numbers in their own organization change, a fact they themselves admit. “While we have achieved positive movement over the last year, it’s clear to all of us that we still aren’t where we want to be. There’s more work to do. We remain deeply committed to building a workplace that reflects a broad range,” Facebook said in the diversity report.