>>11038541Art critic and activist Craig Owens said that sexual bias is exhibited by the choice to make the man in the diagram perform the wave gesture to greet the extraterrestrials while the woman in the diagram has her hands at her sides.[10] Feminists also took issue with this choice for the same reason.[11]
Carl Sagan regretted that the figures in the finished engraving failed to look panracial. Although this was the intent, the final figures appeared Caucasian.[11] In the original drawing, the man was drawn with an "Afro" haircut, so an additional African physical trait would be included in the man to make the figures look more panracial, but that detail was changed to a "non-African Mediterranean-curly haircut" in the finished engraving.[12] Furthermore, Carl Sagan said that Linda Sagan intended to portray both the man and woman as having brown hair, but the hair being only outlined rather than being both outlined and shaded made the hair appear blonde instead.[13] Other people had different interpretations of the race of people depicted by the figures. Whites, blacks and Asians each tended to think that the figures resembled their own racial group, so, although some people were proud that their race appeared to have been selected to represent all of humankind, others viewed the figures as "terribly racist" for "the apparently blatant exclusion" of other races.[8]
