Skip to footer

New emojis shed gender stereotypes: why tiny toons are such a big deal

Facebook Messenger's latest additions to its cast of emojis include depictions of women and girls in professions and poses that break from traditional gender stereotypes.

|
Courtesy of Facebook
Facebook introduced a suite of new emoji icons for its Messenger app on Thursday.

Facebook Messenger emojis are about to get a whole lot more diverse.

Beginning Thursday, 1,500 additional emojis will be added to Facebook Messenger with more gender and racial representation to be more representative of the app's users.

Although some Facebook users may see this update as trivial, to others it is a major victory, and one that has been a long time coming.

"It may seem fairly innocuous, but when millions of women and girls with access to a mobile phone or computer pepper their text conversations with emojis on a daily basis, those tiny icons suddenly have huge implications," Karolyn Coorsh wrote for CTVNews in March. "Take a quick browse through the plethora of emojis on a phone and you may see that the ‘female’ emojis typically show women or girls putting on nail polish, getting a haircut or dancing in a bunny outfit, while emojis depicting professions or sports are typically portrayed by males... those emojis can subtly reinforce those societal limitations that have been placed on girls for generations."

The announcement comes less than a month after several Google employees petitioned for more gender parity in emojis, calling for 13 new potential female characters such as a doctor, a farmer, and a scientist. 

"No matter where you look, women are gaining visibility and recognition as never before. 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?" wrote four Google employees earlier this month in a proposal to the Silicon Valley-based Unicode Consortium, a member organization between Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google that oversees the addition of emoji characters. "Our proposal is to create a new set of emoji that represent a wide range of professions for women and men with a goal of highlighting the diversity of women’s careers and empowering girls everywhere."

These new emojis do just that.

"We’re diversifying the genders to create a more balanced mix that’s more representative of our world. Now, using Messenger emojis, you’ll see a female police officer, runner, pedestrian, surfer and swimmer for the very first time, and we’ll keep rolling these out," the company announced in a Facebook post. "In an effort to make the emojis you send a better representation of our world, you will also be able to pick the skin color you prefer. All you have to do is set the color you want your default emojies to be when Messenger launches, and your emojis after that will follow your preference."

And Facebook is also releasing emojis with red hair: a long-time request by emoji users.

Along with the diversity updates, Facebook Messenger is updating their emoji application so the images display correctly for all messenger users regardless of operating platform. Now users on Android, iOS or any other platform will receive the emoji instead of a “broken-looking black boxes" or other error messages. 

Considering 10 percent of all mobile messages sent via Facebook Messenger include an emoji, it’s important that they are representative of users, says Facebook.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to New emojis shed gender stereotypes: why tiny toons are such a big deal
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2016/0602/New-emojis-shed-gender-stereotypes-why-tiny-toons-are-such-a-big-deal
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe