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Establish A Niche To Quickly Grow Your Business

One of the most common complaints I hear from businesses executives is about the competitive nature of their business. They’ll often say to me “We offer the same service as our competitors. So, if we…


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Facebook's New Logo Is A Visual Nod To Gender Equality

A woman designer at Facebook recently updated the company’s iconic “friends” logo, making the woman’s silhouette larger and moving it in front of the man’s. Facebook hide caption

itoggle caption Facebook

One of Facebook’s iconic logos just got an update. That tiny image that lingers in the corner of most Facebook pages — two small silhouettes of a man and a woman — it will be a little different on Facebook mobile pages starting this week.

The old image featured the woman’s silhouette behind the man’s, with the woman’s figure a bit smaller. In a Medium post published yesterday, Facebook designer Caitlin Winner said she didn’t like that. “Much to my dismay,” she wrote, “not long into my tenure as a Facebook designer I found something in the company glyph kit worth getting upset about.”

She continued, “The iconic man was symmetrical except for his spiked hairdo but the lady had a chip in her shoulder. After a little sleuthing I determined that the chip was positioned exactly where the man icon would be placed in front of her… I assumed no ill intentions, just a lack of consideration but as a lady with two robust shoulders, the chip offended me.”

So, Winner went about changing the friend logo. She fixed that drooping, chipped shoulder, and updated the hair, which she said previously was a “Darth Vader-like helmet.” Winner also updated the man icon, adding a “slight slope to his shoulders” and a hair style that is “smoothed down.”

This biggest change, though, was what Winner did with the proportion and framing of the two icons in relation to each other. Winner placed the woman in front of the man, and made their sizing appear more equal. She said of her urge to make that shift, “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.”

Facebook designer Caitlin Winner went through several styles until she found the best one to replace the previous woman icon’s “Darth Vader-like helmet.” Facebook hide caption

itoggle caption Facebook

Facebook heralded the update. In a statement sent to NPR, Maxine Williams, Global Director of Diversity for the company, said, “Caitlin’s fearless approach to changing our design is a great example of our open and bold culture – so much bias operates as a result of unconscious choices and influences. The more diversity there is in our population, the more we will be able to check ourselves on bias in product decisions and elsewhere.”

Williams continued, “We want to represent the many kinds of people that use Facebook – from the biggest to the smallest details – and this is a great example of what happens when you are not afraid to identify and address issues while being conscious that we will always be on a path to improvement.”

But besides this symbolic gesture at Facebook, gender diversity at the tech giant still needs work. Internal numbers from Facebook published last month show that more than two-thirds of all Facebook employees are male. Only 16% of Facebook’s tech employees are women, and only 23% of the company’s senior leadership are women.

The American Association of University Women (AAUW) has published extensive research on gender issues in Silicon Valley. They found in their most recent report that women make up only 26% of the tech workforce, and earn only 19% of all computer science and related bachelor’s degrees. Catherine Hill, VP of Research at AAUW said of the findings, “These numbers represent a decline in women’s representation over the last two-three decades.”

Hill does say she is pleased with Facebook’s new friend logo, but that it is not enough on its own to change lingering gender issues in the tech world. “We are pleased to see a new Facebook Friends Icon, and appreciate that it presents a different, more powerful vision of women,” she said in a statement to NPR. But she continued, “We hope that the company lives up to these changes, as we have a long way to go for women in tech.”

Facebook has made other gender changes recently. Last year, the company gave people wider choice in selecting a gender description on the site, adding a “custom” option that includes choices like Trans Male or Female, Cisgender or Androgynous. And the company has softened its stance on all users using their “real names” on Facebook profiles, after it led to the deactivation of dozens of accounts belonging to drag queens.

However much of a change for Facebook the new friend symbol represents, one thing is clear: when work spaces include more women, women are more likely to stand shoulder to shoulder with men — even in tiny Facebook logos.

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Greece By The Numbers

The drachma was Greece's currency before it joined the eurozone in 2001. There's now talk that Greece could leave the euro and return to its old currency, though economists say the transition would be difficult and the drachma would likely be extremely weak.

The drachma was Greece’s currency before it joined the eurozone in 2001. There’s now talk that Greece could leave the euro and return to its old currency, though economists say the transition would be difficult and the drachma would likely be extremely weak. Christopher Furlong/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

The Greek crisis is messy and complicated, filled with nebulous terms being casually tossed around. Most every story has obligatory mentions of “austerity,” “bailouts” and “capital controls,” but it can be difficult to determine what, precisely, all that jargon means.

So let’s stick to the numbers. Here’s a primer on some of the most important ones in the unfolding Greek drama:

2009: The year the crisis began. As the entire global economy reeled, Greece announced it had been understating its budget deficits for years. This upset its European partners, though at the time, it seemed like just one more financial problem among many. But more than five years and two bailouts later, Greece’s economic problems are more dire today than when this all began.

25: The percentage by which the Greek economy has contracted over the past five years. It’s an extraordinary figure for a country at peace, comparable to the U.S. Great Depression in the early 1930s.

25 (again): The Greek unemployment rate, in percent. That may actually understate the problem. The country’s critics say far too many workers are on the government payroll and should be let go. And the unemployment rate for those under 25 is staggering — it has been around 50 percent for several years now.

92: The actual income earned by a typical Greek citizen is 92 percent higher than the income reported to the government, according to a 2012 study. Tax evasion is endemic in Greece and a major contributor to the government’s budget shortfalls. Creditors are demanding this be addressed in return for a new rescue package.

60: The maximum number of euros that Greeks can withdraw from their bank accounts each day. That works out to about $66. However, ATMs are starting to run out of cash and the banks have now been closed for more than a week. It’s still not clear when they will reopen, and even more importantly, whether Greeks will respond by making a run on the banks and withdrawing all of their money immediately.

240 billion: The euros that international lenders have provided to Greece in recent years as part of the bailouts (around $264 billion at the current exchange rates). That’s a lot for a country of just 11 million people. But Greeks say much of the bailout money has simply gone to pay off earlier lenders and has not been used to rebuild the Greek economy. Hence the term “extend and pretend,” that’s often used to describe the process.

2: Percent of economic output that Greece contributes to the 19-country eurozone. Some European leaders and economists say that because Greece’s economy is small and the troubles have dragged on for so long, the country’s problems are unlikely to cause a broader contagion in Europe or beyond.

81: Percent of Greeks who say they want to remain in the eurozone, according to one recent poll. This may sound contradictory given Greece’s vote in Sunday’s referendum, where it rejected the terms proposed by its creditors. However, many Greeks say they want to keep close links to Europe but are tired of deals that inflict pain without leading to a solution. Critics say this shows Greece’s desire to have it both ways — it wants large sums of aid from Europe and other lenders without meeting the same standards of others in the eurozone.

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