A Blog by Jonathan Low

 

Jul 20, 2016

Now All Of Your Emojis Can Be Male or Female

Not exactly a solution to the gender issues in tech, but you have to start somewhere, one supposes. JL

Andrew Cunningham reports in LeadGitzmos:

11 new "professional" emoji will depict both men and women performing different jobs, and there will be both male and female versions of 33 existing emoji that currently depict either a man or a woman but not both. The plan is based largely on a proposal from Google.
The Unicode Consortium announced plans (PDF) to support new emoji aimed at promoting gender equality—11 new "professional" emoji will depict both men and women performing different jobs, and there will be both male and female versions of 33 existing emoji that currently depict either a man or a woman but not both. The plan is based largely on a proposal from Google, a prominent member of the Unicode Consortium, back in May (PDF).
The new professions include, in the Unicode Consortium's words: a farmer, welder, mechanic, health worker, scientist, coder, business worker, chef, student, teacher, and rockstar.
To avoid the normally lengthy wait time associated with new emoji—Unicode 9.0 was just finalized in June, and version 10.0 won't be finalized until June of 2017—Unicode is using combinations of existing emoji to create the new ones. The process is similar to, though not exactly the same as, the system for changing skin tones. A special character called a "zero-width joiner" (ZWJ) can be placed between two or more emoji, and operating systems that support it know to put out a different composite emoji rather than a series of separate emoji.
The new emoji for professions start with either a man or woman emoji, then a ZWJ character, then another character related to the job. Emoji that were previously one specific gender (the dancing woman or the man running) can be joined to a male or female symbol with a ZWJ character to create emoji of either gender. And all of these emoji can be combined with the existing skin tone modifiers to produce diverse versions of either gender.
Representation in emoji still isn't a solved problem. Not all skin tones and hair colors are represented, and today's update operates under the assumption that gender is binary but this is a big step forward. Software companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft can begin to integrate these combined emoji into their operating systems now, and we may begin to see them in use before the end of the year.

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