Adjective
“dominated by or emphasizing masculine interests or a masculine point of view — compare ” – Merriam-Webster dictionary
The word was encountered through the reading “Design avatars that make sense — and be more inclusive in the process” by Michelle Venetucci Harvey.
The sentence that this word was used in was “This tendency to view men’s bodies, thoughts, and experiences as more normative than women’s is a phenomenon called androcentrism. Even in contexts that we think of as being gender and race neutral, andro and eurocentric biases lead to detrimental outcomes in medicine, business, and education — and in online communities.”
The author was trying to convey the idea how western society prefers males to be the icon. She also used the example of Pac man, a character that was created as a male before having a female opposite. Androcentrism was a word utilized to describe this social behavior or trend that masculinity is the norm and the author wanted to bring attention to this issue that gender-neutral avatars are not actually neutral. Michelle may have wanted to suggest that companies who have default icons should avoid a silhouette of a person. Instead, they could use an abstract auto-generated image, animals, initials and maybe even the company logo like Open lab is currently using.
Definition l Example of androcentric avatars l Example of non-androcentric avatar
