Emoji: Designers working to make icons more inclusive and diverse.
The first time emoji appeared as standard fare on iPhone keyboards in 2011, they struck a familiar pattern.
Male-looking emoji were portrayed as police officers, construction workers, runners. Female emoji, meanwhile, were relegated to getting a massage, a haircut or dancing.
It didn’t take long for users to call these roles into question and demand more inclusive images.
In the years since, emoji have evolved.
They have become more genderinclusive, with female emoji being outfitted with the same professional uniforms as their male counterparts, and more racially diverse — all depictions of people have been equipped with a skin-tone option that allows the user to designate one of six skin tones, from the standard Simpsons yellow to pale and different shades of brown.
This year’s new lineup of emoji may be the most radical yet.
Among the 69 new characters being considered are a woman with a headscarf —a hijab, maybe, or a sari — a breast-feeding mom and a third gender option for people who don’t fit neatly into the male-female binary.
Experts and emoji aficionados hope that, if adopted by a nonprofit that regulates the images, the new emoji will signal to users that, like language,
these tiny pictographic characters can adapt and be used to better honor the unique experiences of all people.
“The reason people love to use emoji is it transcends a linguistic barrier,” said Yiying Lu, the creative director at 500 Startups who helped design several new emoji, including the longawaited dumpling. “And if you’re trying to communicate something that represents you but there is no word for it — because each emoji is a word in this language — that can be very frustrating. It can feel like you don’t matter.”
Paul Hunt, a San Francisco typeface designer and font developer for Adobe, pitched the Unicode Consortium, the body charged with adopting the new emoji, on the idea of creating what he has called “emoji for the postgender generation.”
In the consortium’s initial release, three androgynous people are depicted: a child, an adult and an older person. Hunt has said the faces, with big eyes and short hair, were created to be gender-neutral or gender-ambiguous, and could be used by people who identify as neither male nor female.
Hunt hopes Apple and Google will include the new emoji and extend gender-neutral or androgynous versions beyond the three proposed characters. In his vision, a gender-ambiguous emoji would sit in lotus alongside the male and female emoji doing yoga (another one of the new character suggestions) or don a graduation cap or dance between the men and women in bunny ears and leotards.
“My wish is that adding more gender options in emoji will help us all to celebrate our unity and our diversity,” Hunt wrote in a blog post advocating the third-gender emoji. “In terms of emoji reflecting our emerging understanding of gender, the addition of three gender inclusive people emoji is only a first step. For full inclusive gender representation to exist in emoji, there must be androgynous emoji representations corresponding to each man/woman pair.”
Every app maker designs its own interpretation of the standard emoji set, which is why smiley faces look different on Facebook, Twitter and in text messages on your smartphone. But most limit their emoji to those the consortium has officially introduced.
Google and Apple have not yet said what they might do with the new emoji suggestions, because the list will not be final until June.
Last summer, 70 emoji were unveiled with Apple’s latest release of its mobile iOS software, including several of “active women” working in professions and exercising, a step that many heralded as welcome, if not long overdue.
“There’s always been this French dude artist, and, you know, I’m not a French dude, so I’m not going to use that because it’s not me,” Lu said. “It was kind of surprisingly designers ensures that the so-called language of emoji remains universal and translatable across devices. But it also slows the process of getting an image approved, designers say, stalling the evolution of emoji.
This, said Katrina Parrott, the founder of diversity-focused emoji app iDiversicons, means vendors like Apple and Google can’t be as inclusive and diverse as they may want to be. In fact, workers at Google were among the first to champion broadening professional emoji categories to include female characters.
“We can literally create anything that we want,” said Parrott, who believes her app was the first to offer different skin tones, emoji people with disabilities, samesex couples and more. “When you see people take the time to create something that truly represents them, it gives folks a sense of pride and belonging. It’s a great thing. When someone sends me an emoji with dreadlocks or an Afro, something that represents me, it makes you feel good.”
Millions of people who engage in online communication use the icons to convey feelings, actions and other sentiments that transcend the written word, emoji devotees said.
An estimated 92 percent of people on the Internet use emoji, according to data from Emogi, a New York City analytics firm. Since Apple added an emoji keyboard to its mobile devices in 2011, about 40 percent of captions on Instagram have contained emoji alongside words.
Of course, emoji still have a long way to go before everyone can feel included.
Red-haired people have long called for the addition of ginger emoji, and emoji users with multiracial families have reported feeling stifled by the single-race family options afforded by the standard lineup.
Those still dissatisfied have options: Design and pitch the consortium on new additions, download an app like iDiversicons or Bitmoji, or wait and hope that the emoji world catches up with the real one.