Creating a Better Gender Neutral Icon (you can’t make everyone happy, but you can try)
Do you know someone who is transgender?
Transgender is an umbrella term for people with gender identity or expression that is different from their assigned sex or gender, including people who are not exclusively masculine or feminine. Facebook provides 58 different gender options (so far) for people to choose from. The Williams Institute at UCLA estimates 0.6% of adults identify as transgender — that comes out to about 1.4 million people in the United States alone.
That’s 1.4 million people whose gender identity differs in part or totally from the socially constructed norms of Male or Female.
That’s 1.4 million people who don’t identify with the gender icons and signage that permeate the systems we use, the internet we surf, and public spaces we live in.
That’s a lot of people.
Designing a gender neutral icon.
I’m a user experience lead for my company, POMIET. We create and build technology solutions for clients in the healthcare domain. Recently, our UX team determined we wanted to use a gender neutral icon while designing an online customer portal for a large insurance entity. Our decision was based in large part on the statistics you see above — in the client’s target market the number of potential users who fall under the transgender umbrella is approximately 92,000!
That’s a lot of people.
“Restroom People” weren’t going to cut it so our next step was to search for a good gender neutral icon. However, most of the ones we found from icon warehouses leaned toward one gender or the other or (frequently) tried to combine pants and skirts into one graphic. Ouch. A quick search on a creative site like dribbble.com for “gender icon(s)” returned more than 40 results. A search for “genderless icon” or “gender neutral”, on the other hand, returned nothing — 0 results.
Our goal then is to create & iterate to a perfect-good-looking-genderless icon, and one with some personality if possible. Designing our own icon solves a couple of problems for us: 1) we can begin to consider the 1.4 million people with gender identity issues, and 2) one gender neutral graphic can represent everyone, regardless of their gender or gender identity.
Share our work. Feedback welcome.
Below are six of the gender neutral icons we plan to evaluate with our target users and others. We would appreciate you sharing this article forward and also giving us any feedback and suggestions you have for improvement. You’re welcome to use any of the icons for your own work but please credit POMIET. If you’d like the .svg file please contact me directly at lisa.douglas@pomiet.com. If you want to iterate on our designs we’d love to see where you go with your gender neutral icon.
Thanks for reading! — Lisa J Douglas, PhD; co-authors Carrie Nickels & Nick Kizirnis
Who is POMIET?
We design and build innovative software systems for clients in the healthcare domain. Help us reimagine health!
