Courtesy of Google
It's 2016, and we live in a world where a person can use tiny illustrations of eggs, avocados, and champagne to make brunch plans and send an emoji of Kim Kardashian's butt via text message. Truly, it's a remarkable time to be alive. And like 92 percent (that's right: 92 percent!) of the world's online population, we at Glamour HQ— delight in using emoji to communicate; however, there is one major factor missing from our keyboards that is utterly disheartening: a lack of diversity of women's careers. Sure, you can send send icons of a bride, or a woman getting her haircut, or a princess, but do you know what you can't send? An icon of woman doctor. Or a woman engineer. Or a woman chemist. Seems strange, no?
Now, thanks to a team of engineers at Google, this will soon change. On Thursday, the company announced that a new set of emojis that will represent a wider range of professions for both women and men has just been approved by the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee that oversees emoji creation. These four engineers—Rachel Been, Agustin Fonts, Nicole Bleuel, as reported by BuzzFeed—have created 11 new professional emojis that will appear as both male and female options with all skin tones.
Even better, some of your most beloved existing emoji will get their respective female or male counterparts. No longer will you be limited to sending icons of a male police officer, runner, cyclist, or private investigator. These animations will soon have female versions. And similarly, if you ever wanted to send an emoji of a man getting a haircut or giving a sassy palm up reaction—icons that were previously limited to female representation—you will soon be able to do so.
The exact release date of these new emoji is still TBD, but honestly, it can't get here soon enough.
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Source: http://www.glamour.com/story/finally-emoji-will-get-gender-equality
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