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Exclusive: Google releases 53 gender fluid emoji
[As emojis] become more inclusive, each becomes less universal. Jennifer Daniel, designer at Google, thinks about this deep irony at the heart of visual language all the time. She traces it back to the age-old problem with the male bathroom symbol. "That person could be man, woman, anyone," she says. "But they had to add a little detail, that dress, and suddenly that person symbol doesn't mean person anymore; it means man. And that culture means a man-centered culture."
While Daniel can't fix our bathroom signage, as the director of Android emojis, she can fix another problem: The lack of gender-neutral symbols in texting. She can give us the zombies, merpeople, children, weightlifters that are neither male nor female. "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," says Daniel. "But you can create something that feels more inclusive."
Google is launching 53 updated, gender ambiguous emoji as part of a beta release for Pixel smartphones this week (they'll come to all Android Q phones later this year). Whether Google calls them "non-binary" or not, they have been designed to live between the existing male and female emoji and recognize gender as a spectrum. Given that Google collaborates with many of its rivals on emoji, it's likely that Apple and others will release their takes on genderless emoji later this year.
Daniel sits on the Unicode consortium–the organization that sets core emoji standards, including signifiers like gender and other details, that designers at Apple, Google, and other companies then follow to create their emoji. Last year, she pointed out that there were 64 emoji that, according to Unicode's standards, were never meant to signify gender. In fact, 11 don't have a Unicode-defined signifier for male or female at all–like baby, kiss, fencing person, and snowboarder. As for the remaining 53, they could be male, female, or neither.
Yet Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, and, yes, Google, have often assigned genders with their designs for these emoji. It's why every construction worker across major operating systems is, by default, is a man. Unicode's standards dictated a construction "person," but tech companies decided to design them as construction men (and add women as a secondary option).
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(Score: 2) by tomtomtom on Saturday May 11 2019, @08:32PM (1 child)
The urinal is pretty global these days, at least in venues where the scale means it is worthwhile including them (although these days its getting quite unusual to see the old-style trough rather than individual urinals but whether there are dividers still seems to be 50/50 on individual urinals in my experience). They are also much more water efficient than flushing toilets these days which is another reason to install them in some places.
Presence of urinals in turn means that the vast majority of people want a segregated male-only room for them. But what is also true is that outside the US it is also now much more common to have doors on the stalls which go floor to ceiling which means it is possible to make them unisex without causing major fuss. So I can see a future where the segregation is urinals vs cubicles rather than male vs female (but that requires women to "give up" something which can be a politically hard choice for a decision maker to take so it's probably quite a slow change I expect).
(Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday May 12 2019, @04:14AM
And then your done. No trauma.
If you're too squeamish to make it through either of those routes, you wait in line for a private toilet. Big venues will have some of those too.
I don't see what stalls from floor to ceiling have to do with any of it. If someone actually crawls under the dang stall door they'd probably be spotted very quickly, at any rate scream and kick and you'll be rescued. I suppose it could be a worry at a time of day when the place was empty, but at that time you'd just go to a private toilet and lock the door anyhow if you have any worry.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?