Unicode Consortium recently announced that they will be rolling out a new range of emoticons, or emojis, that will address both the male and the female public. This decision comes after more and more social media users asked for emoticon gender equality.
Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organization that is devoted to maintaining, promoting and developing software internalization data and standards. They released the plans for a new variety of emojis that will eliminate the idea of a society dominated by the male figure.
Currently, social media platforms offer emoticons that are either male or female, but if you want one in the other gender, you can’t have it. At least, not for the moment.
According to the document, there will be eleven new professional emoticons depicting both women and men. The characters will be performing different jobs from plumbers to scientists, to doctors, and musicians.
Google, which is one of the most prominent members of the Unicode Consortium, proposed this new, more equal implementation of emoticons last May.
The new professions proposed by the non-profit organization include welder, farmer, health worker, mechanic, coder, scientist, chef, business worker, rocks star, student, and teacher.
The process of creating new emojis takes considerable time. In order to save a couple of months, the developers are currently working on a shortcut. They are modifying existing emoticons, thus allowing the new generation of emojis that is promoting emoticon gender equality to hit the market sooner than 2017.
For example, for the new professions emojis, the team starts with an existing emoticon of a woman or a man and then adding a WJ character. The emojis that are available in a single gender, like the man running and the dancing woman, will be joined by a female or male symbol and a ZWJ character, thus creating an emoticon of either gender.
All of the new emojis are compatible with the new skin tone modifiers codes that generate diverse skin colors of either gender.
There are still a lot of lacunas in the field of emoticons. Lots of hairs colors are not featured, lots of jobs are overlooked, and some members of the LGBTQ community are complaining that there are no emoticons of men putting on lipstick.
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Image source: Unicode Consortium