Google proposes equality-boosting emoji showing professional women

Google workers feel that emoji could be used to promote gender equality. A quartet of employees have put forward a new set of emoji that portray women in a number of different professional roles such as technology engineer, mechanic, and farmer.

In a bid to balance things out a little, the emoji proposal sees women portrayed in more roles than ever before, including those traditionally thought of as being male-dominated. A set of 13 new emoji have been submitted to the Unicode Consortium for consideration. They may later be added to the official emoji set.

In the proposal, entitled Expanding Emoji Professions: Reducing Gender Inequality, four Google employees say: "Google wants to increase the representation of women in emoji and would like to propose that Unicode implementers do the same. Our proposal is to create a new set of emoji that 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 aim is to standardize the emoji by the end of 2016, by which time the US could have its first female president:

The global women's equality movement is growing, so the time to create these emoji is now. All around the world, gender inequity is a focus. The United Nation's new sustainable development agenda calls for achieving gender equity and empowering all women and girls, and the US Treasury recently announced that Harriet Tubman will grace the front of the next version of the $20 bill (and that other influential women will be added to the $10 and $5 bills). Not to mention the fact that Hillary Clinton is closing in on becoming the first female presidential candidate at the top of a major-party ticket (and, possibly, the first woman US president).

It seems unlikely that the emoji will not be formally adopted -- the only real question is exactly when it will happen.