Apps Engine: Promoting gender equality through emoji

Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Promoting gender equality through emoji

More than 90 percent of the worlds online population use emoji. But while theres a huge range of emoji, there arent a lot that highlight the diversity of womens careers, or empower young girls. There are emoji like these for men:

but with options like these for women:

… the emoji representing women aren’t exactly, well, representative. So weve been working to make things better.

In May, we proposed a set of new emoji to the Unicode Technical Committee that represent a wider range of professions for women (as well as men), and reflect the pivotal roles that women play in the world. Since then, weve worked closely with members of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee to bring the proposal to life.

Today, the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee has agreed to add 11 new professional emoji, in both male and female options and with all the skin tones. That’s more than 100 new emoji to choose from!

Unicode is also adding male and female versions to 33 existing emoji. For example, youll be able to pick both a female runner emoji and a male runner emoji, or a man or woman getting a haircut:

These additions can be included in future versions of Android and other platforms—because Unicode helps make sure that people with different phones can send and receive the same emoji.

These new emoji are one of several efforts we’re making to better represent women in technology, and to connect girls with the education and resources they need to pursue careers in STEM. One such effort is Made with Code, which helps girls pursue and express their passions using computer science. Ahead of World Emoji Day this weekend, Made with Code is releasing a new project that teaches coding skills through the creation of emoji-inspired stickers.

We hope these updates help make emoji just a little more representative of the millions of people around the ?? who use them.

Posted by Nicole Bleuel, Marketing Lead & Diversity Champion, Emoji

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