On Tuesday, a group of progressive Google employees presented a proposal to the Unicode Consortium (the group that controls which emojis make it to your phone) advocating for the addition of 13 new emojis, according to BuzzFeed News.
The goal of the new emojis, as stated in the proposal, is to “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.”
The new emojis will show women actually, you know, working—as most women do, most of the time—rather than just getting married, getting haircuts and making random arm and hand signals, as female emojis currently tend to do. They’ll even get to do a bunch of different kinds of work, like music, health care and farming.
Women have been poorly represented in the emoji world for a while now. A survey conducted by the Always #LikeAGirl campaign found that “48% of girls ages 16 to 24 believe that female emojis are stereotypical,” and “roughly 42% of the same group think emojis illustrate “limited representation of females’ interests.” Basically, emojis have just been further supporting stereotypical depictions of women in society.
According to BuzzFeed, lack of diversity and equality has been a topic of discussion regarding emojis ever since their debut in 2011. They recently added a wide array of skin tone options, as well as images of same-sex relationships and families, into their hieroglyphic language. However, people still want them to go further. This is why the proposal not only urges for equal representation of men and women on the emoji keyboard, but also presses for representation of those who do not identify with any particular gender.
Even though emojis might seem pretty simple and frivolous, the creation of each one requires intense research before they can be approved. Since this proposal is still in the early stages, we have no idea what the results will be. The next Unicode update is currently set for mid-2017 and we can only hope that these gender-equalizing emojis are a part of it.