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Google's New Emoji Aimed At Promoting Gender Equality Are Coming (arstechnica.com) 200

An anonymous reader writes: Based largely on a proposal from Unicode Consortium member Google, Unicode Consortium has announced plans to support new emoji aimed at promoting gender equality. There will be "11 new 'professional' emoji [that] will depict both men and women performing different jobs, and there will be both male and female versions of 33 existing emoji that currently depict either a man or a women but not both," writes Ars Technica. "The new professions include, in the Unicode Consortium's words: a farmer, welder, mechanic, health worker, scientist, coder, business worker, chef, student, teacher, and rockstar." What's unusual about the new emoji is that they're created using combinations of existing emoji to avoid waiting for Unicode version 10.0 to be finalized in June of 2017. By using a special "zero-width joiner" (ZWJ) character between two or more emoji, operating systems that support it know to put out a different composite emoji rather than a series of separate emoji. "The new emoji for professions start with either a man or woman emoji, then a ZWJ character, then another character related to the job," reports Ars. "Emoji that were previously one specific gender (the dancing woman or the man running) can be joined to a male or female symbol with a ZWJ character to create emoji of either gender. And all of these emoji can be combined with the existing skin tone modifiers to produce diverse versions of either gender." We may see these combined emoji before the end of the year as software companies begin to integrate them into their operating systems.
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Google's New Emoji Aimed At Promoting Gender Equality Are Coming

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 14, 2016 @05:01PM (#52513881)

    that should fix all the gender issues.

    • I mean people used to make up emojis and now we have committees to from standards and graphic artists designing them and people debating them. Take the time and money and do something that matters even a little. I am still waiting for the one eyed bisexual Episcopalian Kangaroo emoji.

  • This must be the 50th Google related article today. Anything else happening in the world today?

  • I was hoping for rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief.

    • If you're going to go with Indian chief you obviously want to pair it with cowboy, cop, biker, soldier, and construction worker.
  • Great! (Score:5, Funny)

    by friesofdoom ( 3817155 ) on Thursday July 14, 2016 @05:12PM (#52514015)
    I'm glad to see that google is taking impressive steps at forwarding humanity!
  • by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Thursday July 14, 2016 @05:12PM (#52514025)
    Stop releasing fucking emojis for either sex. And Unicode Consortium, stop thinking it's your job to assign characters to arbitrary and ephemeral emojis because it isn't.
    • Dear god. If I had any karma points left I would up-vote you a million times. I'm all for gender-equality but this emoji shit is utter bullshit.

      Unicode should contain letters, period.

      • Dear god. If I had any karma points left I would up-vote you a million times. I'm all for gender-equality but this emoji shit is utter bullshit.

        Unicode should contain letters, period.

        Do they have a dickbutt emoji? That would be kewl.

    • Unicode has to support some emoji, because Unicode has to be able to interconvert with text from old proprietary Japanese text encodings that included emoji, because that's what Unicode does, it interconverts with every text encoding from everywhere ever. That's the whole point of it.

      And if it's going to be encoding some emoji, it may as well support and fair and neutral selection of races and sexes etc, rather than just whatever random haphazard cross-section of them happened to be included on the whims of

      • by DrXym ( 126579 )
        Fine, so you grandfather crap like wing dings and some other stuff in and you draw a line under it. End of story. If phone operators want to produce a standard to represent emojis they can go off and do it any way they please without bloating unicode any further than it is.
    • by tgv ( 254536 )

      On the other hand, a bunch of whiny idiots seem to think that changing language and other symbolic depictions is the most important struggle, so they get symbolic shit in return. It won't change a thing in the world, except make the whiny idiots feel better.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 14, 2016 @05:12PM (#52514029)

    Google is a fucking search company.

    Emoji's are emoticons and existed in complete form in icq 20 years ago.

    And I'm all for gender equality, but this shit is seriously turning to some Jim Jones level shit and people need to get some fucking perspective. Go volunteer at a homeless shelter, christ.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Go volunteer at a homeless shelter, christ.

      That would actually take work. Screaming about things on Twitter and Facebook is much easier.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      It is just another case of SJW's hijacking existing stuff that works well and then breaking it. The only thing these people care about is themselves.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    If we aren't truly inclusive, someone might feel left out. We need emojis of Caitlyn Jenner as a doctor or lawyer to help out.

    (In these demands/discussions of diversity, no one ever brings up really small groups like Eskimos/Inuits. They get the shaft.)

    Word verification: unbiased

    • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 14, 2016 @06:05PM (#52514399)

      As a trans reader, I feel obligated to say that not all of us are SJWs. A lot of us go about our lives not telling anyone in person about it, except for the people we are dating. Please try not to be influenced by celebrities that are only famous for being related to famous people while being trans. Not long ago, transsexuality was mainly covered as a tabloid Jerry Springer topic, like little people, so they and the media are playing it up for all it's worth.

      Transsexuals make up less than 0.3% of the population and get so much more media attention than more deserving causes with that proportion or more: Down syndrome. Hemochromatosis. IBD, which includes ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease. Parkinson's disease. Type I diabetes.

      Before I graduated, at my university's Student Union Building there was a family bathroom I usually used first, not because of anything to do with being trans, but because it's usually used less often so it's cleaner, and I like my privacy. Before the NC bathroom headlines, they put a sign to the left of it explicitly saying that anyone could use it, regardless of gender identity. It's more likely the Gay-Straight Alliance lobbied for that, but sometimes I think that bureaucrats are going out of their way to antagonize social conservatives so they can tick off some boxes, and it just counterproductively raised awareness of transsexuals --- as a target for social conservative politicians on the right.

      I hope that these words help get across that it's not transsexuals' fault that the media has disproportionate coverage, and a lot of transsexuals would prefer it if there were /less/ awareness and inclusion (when it negatively affects other people, like M2Fs in the Olympics), but you can't exactly raise an awareness campaign about that. I don't usually reply to people, so...please let me know if it did.

      • Transsexuals are an excellent target class for people to hate upon. They are few in number, and violate social norms in a somewhat creepy way. People need an Other to oppress: Right now, it's your turn. If trans acceptance ever becomes universal within a culture, someone else shall take that place.

  • "NO EMOJI!" [pinimg.com]

    More seriously, though, I'm torn on whether I support this or not (like my opinion on the subject matters, haha). If they're going to turn Unicode into AOL Instant Messaging or w/e, I guess they may as well strive to be politically correct about it?

    Meh.

  • [emoji] can be joined to a male or female symbol with a ZWJ character to create emoji of either gender

    AKA the SJW character.

    Seriously though, why not just modify the emoji to be androgenous? They're abstract symbols anyhow, so they might as well be.

    • ((:-{)>

      That's Mohammed.

      ((:-)-8

      That's the 'dude with boobs' version of Mohammed.

    • Because women have long hair (and ponytails) and men have short hair... at least according to the differences I saw between them (except for the swimming one).

  • Oh, wait, "Mother" has already been replaced with "Parent 1"... Is there an emoji for that — and is it different from the symbol for "Parent 2"?

    Here is the symbol for "family" [emojipedia.org] — and, for one, am triggered by their definition:

    A family unit, which is commonly represented as a father, mother, and one or two children.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      At least Mozilla's shows up as a couple of histapnic and irish descent, but that does imply they are both Cathoilc and therefor share the same religion. *TRIGGERED*

    • Here is the symbol for "family" - and, for one, am triggered by their definition:

      If by "triggered" you mean "triggered into writing stupid shit on the internet", then sure. Other than that, taking the piss out of people who mention trigger warnings is about on the same level as taking the piss out of people who mention epilepisy warnings before a video.

  • Now you have another reason not to use unicode here, as if there aren't enough already.

  • I demand my own personal emojis. I'm triggered by emojis that differ from me by gender, race, eye colour and baldness pattern.

  • Seriously, did the static integrity of bags of rice in China improve so much that this is now a story?

  • by pecosdave ( 536896 ) on Thursday July 14, 2016 @06:18PM (#52514503) Homepage Journal

    Sure bicycles are an okay hobby and have an emoji, sure taking a dump has a turd emoji dedicated to it, but going to the range [fool.com] is a hobby that gets Tim Cook's panties in a twist.

    Microsoft is just as bad, but everyone considers them evil anyways.

  • If you have a working brain, you can express yourself with words. If you can't, you're a moron. To hell with emoji.

  • It's going to get out of hand to declare the emoji pretty soon by using the ZWJ. We're going to have
    base emoji + gender + skin tone + hair length eye colour + ...

    People are going to spend longer defining a single emoji than it would have taken them to write what they wanted to say in the first place.

    Of course the opposite direction and trying to include a distinct emoji for every case will be just as crazy.

  • These fucking things called "emojis" are images and should be treated as such.

    They have no business being added to Unicode.

    And I can not believe that there is actually a "Unicode Emoji Subcommittee".

    For crying out loud. What's this world coming to?!?!?!

    Definition of Unicode:

    Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems.

    Do you even remember what Text is? Can you even Write anymore?

    • Unicode has to support emoji, because the mission of Unicode is to interconvert with every text encoding from everywhere ever, and there are old proprietary Japanese text encodings that support emoji, so Unicode has to too.

      And if Unicode has to support some emoji in the first place, and people are actually going to take that legacy support and run with it, then it may as well do it right while it's at it, instead of just whatever haphazard shit a handful of old Japanese coders threw in their proprietary sta

  • Not only does this exclude those who self-identify as gender neutral or fluid (among many other identities), it just assumes that longer hair is enough to signify womynhood, which is a clear nod to the patriarchy!

    In all seriousness, though, this is a private company adding to their services. If it really bugs you that much, don't use Google's services (there are alternatives).

    • And by "private company," I mean, of course, "public company." D'oh.

      Clearly, what I was getting at is that this is a company that you don't absolutely have to affiliate with. It can't govern you, and there are alternatives -- even to a behemoth like Google -- if this issue really rises to the level of boycotting or something.

      • by fnj ( 64210 )

        And by "private company," I mean, of course, "public company."

        Those terms don't have any real meaning. Google is a publicly TRADED company, but it is not publicly MANAGED or publicly OWNED. And whether it was publicly or privately traded, it would be governmentally REGULATED (although the regulations would differ somewhat between publicly and privately traded).

  • Maybe the Unicode consortium need to supplement the ZWJ character with an SJW character.

    In all seriousness, while Unicode is intended to be universal, I don't think that bullshit emojis have a place in it. We have markup in addition to characters, not to mention SVG and other formats which can better represent them. They don't have to be in the Unicode standard.

    • Unicode has to interconvert with Japanese proprietary text encodings that support emoji (because unicode has to interconvert with every text encoding, that's its entire mission), therefore Unicode has to support emoji.

      And if it has to support emoji and people are actually going to use them, it may as well do it right instead of whatever shit a handful of Japanese programmers felt like throwing in there.

  • ...medieval punctuation marks of course.
    https://www.buzzfeed.com/charl... [buzzfeed.com]

  • Just use fucking smileys. A head. Yellow, like no person looks like. Looking nice, clean and clear to understand.

    But no. The smileys got debile like the "tears of joy" face, a parody of what they should tell. And the rest needed to get features like hair, which is associated with gender (do you see, how there is no equality, if you claim you need some smiley with pink shirt and long hair to identify it as female?).

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