On Thursday, Google has announced 11 new emojis characters that portray professional women.
The high-tech giant announced its new female emoji characters in a blog post. Mashable reports that the new set of emoji has been approved by the subcommittee of the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit organization that develops software internationalization standards. Unicode is also adding female versions of the 33 existing male emojis.
Among the new emojis are images that feature a woman as a mechanic, farmer, welder, scientist, health worker, business person, coder, student, chef, teacher and even a rockstar that looks like David Bowie.
According to the Unicode Consortium, the welcome development is the result of a proposal submitted to Unicode earlier this year by four Google employees. This measure came as a result of a public debate over the lack of professional and physically active female emoji characters.
The proposal suggested adding new female emojis that reflects the roles women play in the world. Unicode subcommittee members worked together with Google in order to execute the proposal. Only 11 of the 13 initially proposed emojis were developed because the Unicode subcommittee opted not to pursue emojis for healthcare and high-tech workers. The decision was taken for design consideration as well as to avoid overlapping with existing emojis.
There is no timeline for the rollout but the proposed emoji could be included into future platform versions, such as future versions of Google Android. According to Ars Technica, Unicode 9.0 was just finalized in June and version 10.0 will not be finalized until June of 2017, in order to avoid the lengthy wait time associated with new emojis.
The new female emoji were created by using combinations of existing emojis in a process similar to, to the system used for changing emoji skin tones. A special character called a "zero-width joiner" (ZWJ) is placed between two or more emojis and operating systems supporting ZWJ put out a different composite emoji.
