13 working women emojis that could soon be on your Android/iPhone

Guess what group of people use emojis the most? Young women. Then it’s funny that nearly all of the occupational based emojis depict male workers, right? Wrong. It’s not funny at all. It’s a byproduct of the sexual inequalities that exist in our world and a handful of Google employees are righting this wrong one unicode character at a time: they’ve submitted 13 new emojis for consideration by the Unicode Consortium for inclusion in the quarterly addition of new emojis.

Here they are:

The above are working women emojis in various industries (they’ll be considered along with male counterparts).This will certainly make First Lady of the United States (@FLOTUS) Michelle Obama happy who once famously requested a “girl studying emoji” be made.

Considering the next President of the United States (@POTUS) could be a woman (@HillaryClinton) it’s about time that women get at leaset equal share of emoji. Keep in mind that if women sought their fair share of emoji face time, they’d likely deserve more than equal visibility. If you don’t believe me, just read the report (PDF) put together by Rachel Been, Nicole Bleuel, Agustin Fonts, and Mark Davis of Google. It makes some great points and includes some stunning statistics.

It’s likely that the Unicode Consortium will accept these proposals as we’ve seen a push for diversity including a wider variety of skin shades find their way into the emoji spectrum.

The effort doesn’t stop at standardizing these emoji by the end of 2016, which is a clear goal of the group, but they’re also recognizing the need for gender-neutral emoji and more.

The proposal finishes by acknowledging they think the Unicode Consortium should have, “an inclusive representation of all people in emoji, whether they identify with a specific gender or not.” And while that isn’t the immediate goal of this particular proposal, they further “encourage other members of Unicode to join us in creating a system of emoji design that can accommodate a broader gender spectrum.”

We’ll let you know when any new emoji officially land on your phone.

 

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