Now all of your emoji can be either male or female

Enlarge / The new additions enable all kinds of different occupations for emoji women of many colors. (credit: Google)

The Unicode Consortium announced plans (PDF) to support new emoji aimed at promoting gender equality—11 new "professional" emoji 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 woman but not both. The plan is based largely on a proposal from Google, a prominent member of the Unicode Consortium, back in May (PDF).

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.

To avoid the normally lengthy wait time associated with new emoji—Unicode 9.0 was just finalized in June, and version 10.0 won't be finalized until June of 2017—Unicode is using combinations of existing emoji to create the new ones. The process is similar to, though not exactly the same as, the system for changing skin tones. A special character called a "zero-width joiner" (ZWJ) can be placed between two or more emoji, and operating systems that support it know to put out a different composite emoji rather than a series of separate emoji.

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Source: Gear & Gadgets – Ars Technica http://ift.tt/29BxHB6