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Google's New Emoji Aimed At Promoting Gender Equality Are Coming (arstechnica.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the gender-neutral dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Based largely on a proposal from Unicode Consortium member Google, Unicode Consortium has announced plans to support new emoji aimed at promoting gender equality. There will be "11 new 'professional' emoji [that] will depict both men and women performing different jobs, and there will be both male and female versions of 33 existing emoji that currently depict either a man or a women but not both," writes Ars Technica. "The new professions include, in the Unicode Consortium's words: a farmer, welder, mechanic, health worker, scientist, coder, business worker, chef, student, teacher, and rockstar." What's unusual about the new emoji is that they're created using combinations of existing emoji to avoid waiting for Unicode version 10.0 to be finalized in June of 2017. By using a special "zero-width joiner" (ZWJ) character between two or more emoji, operating systems that support it know to put out a different composite emoji rather than a series of separate emoji. "The new emoji for professions start with either a man or woman emoji, then a ZWJ character, then another character related to the job," reports Ars. "Emoji that were previously one specific gender (the dancing woman or the man running) can be joined to a male or female symbol with a ZWJ character to create emoji of either gender. And all of these emoji can be combined with the existing skin tone modifiers to produce diverse versions of either gender." We may see these combined emoji before the end of the year as software companies begin to integrate them into their operating systems.

2 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. A better way to promote gender equality by DrXym · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Stop releasing fucking emojis for either sex. And Unicode Consortium, stop thinking it's your job to assign characters to arbitrary and ephemeral emojis because it isn't.

  2. Fucking Search Company by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Google is a fucking search company.

    Emoji's are emoticons and existed in complete form in icq 20 years ago.

    And I'm all for gender equality, but this shit is seriously turning to some Jim Jones level shit and people need to get some fucking perspective. Go volunteer at a homeless shelter, christ.