Google Wants Emoji To Inspire Female Careers

Google has proposed 13 new emoji characters to show both women and men in professional roles. It says the aim is “highlighting the diversity of women’s careers and empowering girls everywhere.”

A recent update to Unicode, the standardized system for computerized characters including emoji, allowed for an easier way for customizing existing emojis of humans to have a male, female or gender-neutral variant.

However, Google says it wants to specifically add the 13 new characters to make sure both genders are covered in a wide range of career roles. The new characters would have both male and female variants. Google says the move is particularly important as young women are the group most likely to use emoji, especially in a work context.

Google chose the 13 characters by drawing from a combination of major career groupings and areas where campaigners have highlighted an underrepresentation of women such as science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

The 13 career areas represented by the emoji are:

• Business
• Healthcare (with one character with a stethoscope and another in surgical gear)
• Science
• Education (one character as a graduate, another as a teacher)
• Technology
• Industry (three characters depicting a welder, assembly line worker and repairperson)
• Farming
• Food Service
• Music

In each case, Google says the new emoji could be triggered by combining two existing characters. For example, the female graduate would involve a combination of unicode characters 1F469 (generic female) and 1F393 (mortar board.)