Emojis Just Took a Giant Step Towards Gender Equality

When a quartet of Google employees recently pushed for emojis to become less male-centric, the organization in charge of authorizing the handy characters took notice.

The Unicode Consortium said on Thursday that it would shake things up with urgency. Until now, many emoji have been depicted as men—police officers, for example—while the female characters have been highly stereotyped in other roles, such as hairdressers.