Let’s be honest: the emoji has been the best thing to happen to the text message since the text message itself.

In fact, 92 per cent of the world’s online population use emoji to communicate – your parents have probably even figured it out by now. Someone even rewrote the entire bible in emoji.

But there’s been one thing that’s been absent – and something that’s both surprising and disheartening.

There is a total lack of diversity reflected in the careers of the females.

Visibly absent were female doctors, engineers, police officers, and chemists. Instead, female emoji include brides and princesses. Not to mention, the runner, cyclist and bodybuilder emoji are currently all male.

It’s even more depressing that the majority of users likely didn’t even notice (except this Toronto tech CEO).

The good news is that this will soon change thanks to a team of engineers at Google.

Image: Google Blog

Yesterday, the tech giant announced that a new set of emoji that represents a wider range of professions for both sexes has been approved by the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee that oversees emoji creation.

Pretty soon, some of your favourite existing emoji will get their respective female or male counterparts (so we’ll soon see a man getting a haircut). We’ll also see 11 new professional emoji that will appear as both male and female options with all skin tones. Additionally, 33 existing characters will be altered to allow users to pick between male and female options.

This isn’t the first time emoji have been updated to reflect more diversity.

Last year, a variety of ethnically-diverse emoji were introduced that let users change from the default yellow to one of six skin tones. A series reflecting same-sex couples and families was also added.

The exact release date of these new emoji is still TBD. But sooner rather than later would be great, thanks.

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