Google’s recent proposal, put forward to Silicon Valley's Unicode Consortium (the body that controls and approves universal software standards for letters and other characters), wants to increase the representation of women in emoji and calls for the need to highlight the diversity of women’s careers in emojis so as to better empower girls across the world.
Quoting Amy Butcher’s New York Times op-ed piece, Emoji Feminism, Google’s proposal points to the vast inequality in the current selection of female emoji: “Where was the fierce professor working her way to tenure? Where was the lawyer? The accountant? The surgeon? How was there space for both a bento box and a single fried coconut shrimp, and yet women were restricted to a smattering of tired, beauty-centric roles?”
Google are not alone in this fight for emoji equality, we may have finally managed to put women on the American banknote, but as The New York Times and CNN recently pointed out, female representation in the world of the emoji is still sexist and borderline harmful to girls.
And earlier this year, Always—one of Procter & Gamble’s major brands—released its much shared emoji-centric Like a Girl campaign. The video received over 18 million views, including that of Michelle Obama who responded by posting a Tweet requesting the creation of a ‘girl studying emoji’ to help empower young women.
Off the back of all these discussions, Google’s proposal asks for the addition of 13 new female emoji along with their male counterparts, to span a variety of different sectors including business, music, food, science and education.
The proposal also included a note on the wider implications of gender equality with Google saying: “We recognize the importance of having an inclusive representation of all people in emoji, whether they identify with a specific gender or not. We believe an egalitarian, sensitive, and compelling representation of gender in emoji is extremely important. However, as this is not the focus of this effort, 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.”
But despite a global call for action, and “well written encoding” which could, according to Jeremy Burge, the founder of both the online resource Emojipedia and World Emoji Day, allow the changes to be implemented this year, Unicode don’t seem to be in any hurry to facilitate change. Their newest update, available from June 21 includes 72 new characters, but none are professional women. Unless you class pregnancy as a career?
In fact, the tragic under representation of breakfast foods – currently limited to bread, honey, fried egg in pan and fruit – has been addressed with the newly added croissant, baguette, pancakes, bacon and avocado. But women? Nope.
The update also includes the obviously important, ‘person doing cartwheel’, ‘face with tears of joy’ and ‘face palm’ expressions.
But for now, unless women aspire to paint their nails, get their hair cut, wear pink, dance or get married. The world of emoji remains a male dominated playground.
*face palm*
