As Amy Butcher in The New York Times notes, "Where was the lawyer? The accountant? The surgeon? How was there space for both a bento box and a single fried coconut shrimp, and yet women were restricted to a smattering of tired, beauty-centric roles?"
Four Google designers are on it.
They've created 13 new emojis that show a more realistic and textured representation of women. The team, Rachel Been, Nicole Bleuel, Agustin Fonts, and Mark Davis, proposed the emojis at a recent meeting of theUnicode Consortium, a Silicon Valley nonprofit that oversees new emojis.
The proposed professions (also with male versions) include a doctor, scientist, coder, mechanic, chef, among others. The team will find out by the end of 2016 if its emoji have been accepted.
With the proposal, the team hopes to foster a more complex representation of women's careers, a Google spokesperson tells Tech Insider.
The argument for feminist emojis might seem a little trivial, but millions of people worldwide use them to communicate every day. Young women make up the majority - 78% of women are frequent emoji users versus 60% of men.
The team chose professions dominated by women as well as ones that show a rising female workforce, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the US Department of Labor.
Although a person's gender can reside outside the male-female binary, the designers also acknowledge that wasn't the focus of the project.
"We would encourage other members of Unicode to join us in creating a system of emoji design that can accommodate a broader gender spectrum," they write in the proposal.
It's important to show a diverse representation in every form of media, especially a global language like emojis. Young girls, after all, send a billion of them every day.