Illustration by Chloe White
Since the dawn of the emoji, we've seen a fairly restrictive approach gender stereotypes. More often than not, we see more male emojis that tend to describe general everyday actions and certain jobs, while female emojis are restricted to reactions, princesses, brides, and even that spicy salsa lady dressed in red (because, truth, sometimes you need to send someone a cha, cha, chaaaa, but sometimes you want to show someone you're cha, cha, ching the boss).
It’s 2016 - and women are holding down jobs in STEM, the C-Suite, and HRC is running for POTUS. So our digital emoji world was running a little behind up until last week.
Thanks to Google, women are now represented not only as pretty princess emojis. Earlier this year, Google proposed to Unicode to introduce 11 new emoticons that represented women in diverse work fields to promote gender equality. This week for World Emoji Day, Google announced that they’re coming to life as part of 300 new Google emojis that are being introduced with Unicode.
Sometimes you need to send someone a cha, cha, cha, but sometimes you want to show someone you're cha, cha, ching, the boss.
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“While there’s a huge range of emoji, there aren’t a lot that highlight the diversity of women’s careers, or empower young girls,” wrote Nicole Bleuel, Marketing Lead & Diversity Champion, Emoji, in a recent blog post.
The 11 new emoticons include: doctor, policewoman, cook, coders, a female David Bowie-esque rockstar, farmer, mechanic, construction worker, and many more. The only two emojis that did not make the cut: tech line worker and a nurse.
“We proposed a set of new emoji to the Unicode Technical Committee that represent a wider range of professions for women (as well as men), and reflect the pivotal roles that women play in the world.,” said Google in their announcement on their blog. The new emojis will “make emoji more representative of the millions of people who use them.”
However, of course you can’t have progress, even in the emoji world, without a few haters.
“Why don't we get emoji's to represent humans/ mankind? Why women in particular? Then men also need some emojis like father, son etc.,” said one Twitter user in response to the announcement.
“I can't believe you let feminists get to you. Where is our Demi-queer Bi-gender disco pony day????,” said another user.
However, the fact that a conglomerate like Google was the first to campaign for more emoji representation of women in diverse work fields speaks volumes to the movement that continues to create equality for women in the workplace in the past century. (Even though there is a whole group of boys who see Anna and Elsa from Frozen as the new superheroes. More on that here.)
If Google, a powerful Silicon Valley-based tech company that is notorious for it’s lack of gender and racial diversity, is calling out for more representation within the world of tech itself, it's a step we can throw some love at. (Include all happy emojis here.) And it's a move that will hopefully influence the rest of Silicon Valley to recognize women for tech jobs.
We commend you Google, and we thank you. Because finally, we can show via text that we’re businesswomen, and we don’t have to substitute with a male emoji. Heart. Smiley. Thumbs up.
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