Google employees have proposed a new set of emojis aimed at promoting gender equality in the workplace, including cartoon female engineers, chemists, plumbers and farmers.
The Google team presented the designs of 13 new emojis on Tuesday at the Unicode Consortium, a Silicon Valley not-for-profit group that runs an “emoji subcommittee” overseeing the creation of new emojis.
“No matter where you look, women are gaining visibility and recognition as never before,” the four Google workers wrote in their proposal. “Isn’t it time that emoji also reflect the reality that women play a key role in every walk of life and in every profession?”
As emojis have exploded in popularity in recent years, there have been ongoing debates about diversity in the available images, prompting the creation of more racially diverse faces as well as same-sex emojis.
Given that millions of people across the globe use emojis as an “important means of communication” and that “women under 30 are most the frequent emoji users by far”, the Google proposal said “it’s not surprising that women and men are increasingly vocal about the need for more accurate female representation in emoji professions”.
[vc_btn title=”More on Female Emojis” style=”outline” color=”primary” size=”lg” align=”left” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Ftechnology%2F2016%2Fmay%2F10%2Ffemale-emojis-google-equality|title:More%20on%20Female%20Emojis|target:%20_blank”][vc_message message_box_style=”3d” message_box_color=”turquoise”]By Sam Levin, The Guardian, excerpt posted on SouthFloridaReporter.com , May 11, 2016 [/vc_message]
