2 min read
Emoji have become an integral part of our life as we all found them really helpful while communicating on messaging apps or social media. Emoji help people convey their emotions along with a message. Understanding this need, Google is going to release 53 new emoji that appear to be more gender inclusive for Android users.
In a recent interview with Fast Company, Jennifer Daniel, a designer at Google who also sits on the Unicode Consortium, has revealed that the new emoji will be neither expressly male nor female, instead, it will be gender ambiguous. The under-development emoji designs (shared by Gizmodo) represent many of the same features of the more gendered emoji, but with very minor changes that make the characters appear neither male nor female — or perhaps both.
“We’re not calling this the non-binary character, the third gender, or an asexual emoji — and not gender neutral. Gender neutral is what you call pants”, said Jennifer Daniel. “But you can create something that feels more inclusive.”
According to visuals of the Emoji shared below, Google appears to be still tweaking with specific details of the characters, such as; changing their hairstyle or clothing. The emoji appears to be neither man nor woman due to the unique fluid hairstyles and design choices Google made while developing them. For instance, a merperson (gender quite similar to a mermaid) is designed with crossed arms rather than with a shell bra or no covering at all.
Other noticeable emoji in the newly announced lineup includes a swimmer emoji, a gender-inclusive vampire, a zombie, a genie, joker, a super-person, and emoji depicting various athletic activities.
Daniel seems quite confident that other companies will adopt gender-inclusive emoji, but until they do, any gender-inclusive emoji you send from Android to any other OS will be misinterpreted as male or female.
