Secure your place at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, March 23-25
Emojis are replacing Barbies as the battleground where the fight over the portrayal of women is being waged.
A group of Google employees is pushing for 13 new emojis to be approved with a “goal of highlighting the diversity of women’s careers and empower girls everywhere,” according to their proposal submitted to the Unicode Consortium this week.
“No matter where you look, women are gaining visibility and recognition as never before,” the developers said in a its proposal. “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?”
As of now, emojis depicting women are overwhelmingly stereotypical: There’s nail painting and hair grooming; there’s flamenco dancing and twin burlesque bunnies. Men, meanwhile, are cops and doctors and athletes, as Always pointed out as part of their “Like a Girl” campaign. Google’s proposal includes doctors, farmers, graduates and professors for both sexes. There’s even a David Bowie tribute emoji.
Making unicode emoji less basic with 13 true-to-life representations of professional women: https://t.co/aSOBFkKMGa pic.twitter.com/BfKMSSXgpg
— Google Design (@GoogleDesign) May 11, 2016
Unicode Consortium is currently mulling which emojis will be allowed in its next batch, due to arrive on people’s phones in mid-2017. However, the Googlers might have an advantage since the Consortium’s president, Mark Davis, is also a Google employee.
More in Marketing
‘The conversation has shifted’: The CFO moved upstream. Now agencies have to as well
One interesting side effect of marketing coming under greater scrutiny in the boardroom: CFOs are working more closely with agencies than ever before.
Why one brand reimbursed $10,000 to customers who paid its ‘Trump Tariff Surcharge’ last year
Sexual wellness company Dame is one of the first brands to proactively return money tied to President Donald Trump’s now-invalidated tariffs.
WTF is Meta’s Manus tool?
Meta added a new agentic AI tool to its Ads Manager in February. Buyers have been cautiously probing its potential use cases.