In an effort to better represent the "pivotal roles women play in the world," a four-member team at Google has proposed 13 new emoji depicting women in various professional roles. The Unicode Consortium added a broader spectrum of skin tones last year, but the team from Google is now pushing for equal representation of men and women:
We suggest decoupling the gender-neutral representation of emoji from this proposal. We would encourage other members of Unicode to join us in creating a system of emoji design that can accommodate a broader gender spectrum.
From the proposal submitted to the Unicode Consortium (via TNW):
Google wants to increase the representation of women in emoji and would like to propose that Unicode implementers do the same. Our proposal is to create a new set of emoji that represents a wide range of professions for women and men with a goal of highlighting the diversity of women's careers and empowering girls everywhere.
To come up with the job categories, the team looked at the sectors that contribute to the global GDP:
To make our final selection, we looked at the primary, secondary, and tertiary categories that compose global GDP — Agriculture, Industry and Services — and further broke them down categorically based on global popularity, growth, and overall representation. We additionally added in concepts from popular media campaigns such as #likeagirl, global influencers, and the ongoing support to promote women in STEM. The final determination of the new emoji set was a combination of these above data categories.From the primary sector we selected farming, for the secondary sector, we chose a representation of industry and manufacturing, and for the tertiary sector, we have included healthcare, technology, business representation (lawyer, financial worker, etc), education, food service, and of course, an aspirational rockstar.
The new emoji also include male emojis for the same categories. The team is made up of Rachel Been, Augustin Fonts, Nicole Bleuel, and Mark Davis, who is also the co-founder and president of the Unicode Consortium; and is looking to get the emoji approved by the end of the year.
