/ Case study
Facebook Dating
Safer gender and identity expression for trans and queer people
On Meta’s Responsible Innovation team, I led design work to protect trans and queer people on Facebook Dating, which grew into a company-wide redesign of how gender and pronouns work across Meta’s apps.
Image
Facebook Dating
/ Background
Facebook Dating serves people of all genders and sexual orientations, yet its gender and sexual orientation options fell short. Trans and queer people face a higher risk of harassment, bullying, and violence on dating apps. Without controls designed for them, the product had the potential to cause harm. This left us with a difficult tension to navigate: people needed room to fully express who they are. They also needed enough privacy and safety controls to guard against bullying and harassment.
As Lead Product Design Ethics Partner on Meta’s Responsible Innovation & Ethics team, I embedded with Facebook Dating for a long-term engagement. I led a cross-functional team to design and ship the work, and was the main point of contact between Facebook App and Responsible Innovation leadership.
Role
Lead Product Design Ethics Partner, Responsible Innovation & Ethics
Timeline
2022
/ Product goals
—
Consistent and predictable
Make gender and pronoun options work the same way across Meta’s products.
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Flexible expression
Give people more ways to describe their gender identity and pronouns in their own words.
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Control over visibility
Let people decide where their gender and pronouns appear, on their profile and across Facebook, including notifications.
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Privacy first
Honor privacy settings across the whole experience so no one is accidentally outed.
01
Room to express who you are
We replaced “Female, Male, or Custom” with a more inclusive set of choices: Woman, Man, Nonbinary, and “Let me be more specific,” which searches a list of identities as you type.
People can also add pronouns, including neopronouns, and their sexuality. Each of these is optional and has its own privacy control.
Figure 01
Gender, identity, and pronoun options on Facebook Dating, each with its own privacy control.
Gender selection
Let me be more specific
Pronouns, including neopronouns
02
Privacy as the safeguard
The project held a hard ethical tension: we wanted to allow as much free, authentic expression as possible, but the more visible vulnerable people are, the higher the risk of bullying, harassment, or even in-person violence. Working through it together, the team landed on privacy and reporting controls as the two biggest ways to reduce that risk.
Product Responsibility Considerations
Being outed
Gender, pronouns, and sexuality each have their own toggle, so people choose what appears on their Dating profile.
Unwanted attention
“Interested in” and “Show my profile to” include nonbinary people, so people control who sees them and who they see.
Harassment
Reporting flows were expanded and optimized alongside the new options, so problems are easier to flag.
Targeted misuse
Guardrails and counter-metrics watched for people using the new filters to target trans and queer users.
Figure 02
Privacy sits right inside each choice. People can hide their gender from their Dating profile, and private answers are marked “Not visible on your Dating profile.”
Gender, with the privacy toggle off
Private answers show “Not visible on your Dating profile”
Figure 03
People decide what to show on their profile and who can see it, including nonbinary people.
Sexuality, with a privacy toggle
Show my profile to
03
From one product to the whole company
The work exposed a bigger problem: gender and pronouns behaved differently on Facebook profiles, Dating, Messenger, and Instagram. Facebook’s system pronouns were tied to a binary gender choice, and choosing “Other” singled out nonbinary people. That was confusing for everyone and created privacy and integrity risks.
Many teams each owned a piece of the experience, so I influenced through strategy rather than authority, made the cost and benefit clear to leaders, and set up a way of working with Responsible Innovation designers that teams could keep using.
Figure 04
Facebook before and after: pronouns tied to binary genders, replaced by inclusive gender options and pronouns people choose themselves.
Before: system pronouns
After: inclusive gender options
After: pronouns people choose
/ Outcome
01
In A/B tests, the new design increased use of the gender and identity options by 64% compared with the old “Other” option.
02
In qualitative testing, people said they felt more in control of their experience and their privacy on Dating.
03
The work grew into a company-wide redesign of gender and pronouns, released to everyone on Facebook in December 2022.
/ What I learned
Nothing at Facebook is someone else’s problem. With many teams owning parts of the experience, earning alignment through strategy worked better than any mandate.
A customer-service mindset helped busy teams open up about the problems they needed solved.
The “curb cut” effect: although trans and queer people are a small share of users, cisgender people told us the changes made them feel safer too.
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