Science & Tech

People are campaigning to get more representative female emoji

People are campaigning to get more representative female emoji

Emoji. Love them or hate them, chances are you're pretty fluent by now, since six billion are sent every day.

It was pointed out a few years ago that despite their ubiquitousness, emoji weren't exactly racially diverse. Heck, even Miley Cyrus got involved:

Unicode eventually got around to making a rainbow of skin tones available. Yay.

But there's another long standing problem with emoji which is only just starting to attract attention.

Take a closer look at the characters: the male emojis are doctors, surfers, police officers and athletes.

Now, the female ones. Not only are there far fewer women overall - they're stereotypically portrayed as princesses, brides, and playboy bunnies.

Some women are getting their nails done or their hair cut.

Most of them are pink.

WTF.

Once you see it you can't unsee it, right?

But luckily, Always are on a mission to get Unicode to diversify its female characters:


And Bodyform want to see emojis that speak directly to female experiences, like periods:

Bodyform said:

It really is no secret that there are some emotions and situations that are hard to express, and having the wrong tools to hand doesn’t help matters.

Emoji is the fastest growing language in the world: wouldn't it be great if we didn't have to use the red glass of wine or erupting volcano as a stand in for what we really mean?

UniCode has said vague things about coding gender neutral or female-appearing characters in the past, but has not specified whether they're going to follow through with the idea.

You can sign Bodyform's Change.org petition to get 'femojis' coded here.

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