Google Celebrates World Emoji Day With Gender Diversity

Did you know today is World Emoji Day? Thanks to the fact that July 17 is the arbitrary date used on the calendar emoji in iOS, today has become a day to celebrate all things emoji. Luckily, Google is here to bring some actual goodness to this date by diversifying the emoji readily available to users. They’ve done this by adding 11 new professional emoji in both women and men options, and all the skin tones. This amounts to over a 100 new emoji available for use.

Over at Google’s official blog, the company highlights that while 90 percent of internet users utilize emoji, there’s a visible lack of emoji for women and young girls. And while there are emoji of men dressed in professions like detective and rescue worker, the most prominent emoji featuring women are for things like bride and princess.

Google has decided to help make things better and proposed a new set of emoji to the Unicode Technical Committee with several new professions to choose from. These 11 professional emoji include such jobs as coder, engineer, chef, and rock star with both female and male options to choose from. In addition, they can be chosen with any skin tone for further representation.

In addition, Unicode is adding male and female versions to 33 existing emoji to help further representation of women in our everyday emoji usage. Now users can choose both a male and female runner for instance, or male and female versions of the haircut emoji.

Google is also promising that these emoji will make their way to future Android updates thanks to Unicode which allows different phones to receive the same emoji characters.

Lastly, Google’s homepage links to a Made With Code page that allows one to make their own custom emoji through coding. Made With Code is an organization that helps connect young girls with STEM fields.

The idea behind diversifying emoji has been around for some time. There have been petitions made to Apple to diversify their frankly limited emoji library, and the rapid inclusion of different skin tones for emoji is fairly recent. Hopefully going forward all emoji will be made with the option for different skin tones and gender, so as to be appropriate for all situations.