Google Engineers Propose Professional Female Emoji (Finally)

It's objectively insane that there aren't female professional emoji other than the dancer. This video started to highlight the issue and the Colbert taco emoji proposal really focused our attention on the matter. While female professional emoji won't solve sexism, it is important to see everyone represented in ways that step outside extremely retrograde gender roles. And a solution might be coming. A new proposal by a group of four Google employees seeks to implement women into the professional emojis. The employees ask: "Isn’t it time that emoji also reflect the reality that women play a key role in every walk of life and in every profession?" Um, yes. Yes it is.

Seemingly the inclusion is a no-brainer. Studies show nearly 80% percent of women, against just 60% of men, send the images frequently. Once both genders hit 30, the frequency of emoji use drops precipitously. An Adobe survey says that women are also much more likely to use emojis in work communication than men. So women should, in fact, be the default choice for professional emojis. The Google proposal’s authors, which includes Unicode cofounder Mark Davis, "further broke [the proposed emoji] down categorically based on global popularity, growth, and overall representation." They also weighted the emojis to include representation in the fields of science and technology. The proposed emojis include farmers, scientists, welders, and even rock stars. Check them out here.