Google 'professional women' emoji nominated for Design of the Year

Emoji showing professional women have been nominated among the Designs of the Year by the Design Museum in London.

Last year, the tech company developed a new range of female emoticons which include a farmer, a doctor and a mechanic. "We believe this will empower young women, the heaviest emoji users, and better reflect the pivotal roles women play in the world,” said a spokesman for Google.

Other emoji symbols include a graduate wearing a mortar board, a coder or software engineer working on laptop, a high-tech assembly line worker holding a computer chip with tweezers, a scientist, a chef, a teacher, a nurse and a rock-star.

Google said it had seen the need for new icons following an op-ed in the New York Times by Amy Butcher, which asked: “Where was the lawyer? The accountant? The surgeon? How was there space for both a bento box and single fried coconut shrimp and yet women were restricted to a smattering of tired, beauty centric roles?”

Butcher noted that while women were left painting their nails, men were seen serving on the police force and working in the building industry.

“Given the urgency to improve the representation of women in emoji, we recommend standardizing these characters as quickly as possible,” Google wrote in its application to the Unicode Consortium which approved the new emoticons last July.

The new emoji are expected to come into use by December this year.

Experts at the design museum picked the characters alongside 62 examples of impressive work across the categories architecture, digital, fashion, graphics, product and transport.

Other designs include a hijab designed by Nike, Kanye West’s clothing line,  DixonBaxi’s TV graphics design for the English Premier League, Wolfgang Tillmans’ Remain Campaign for the Brexit referendum, a furniture line made from molten lava and a 3D printed self-driving bus.

A winner will be selected in each category and an overall winner will be announced on January 25.

Previous winners have included the 2012 Olympic Torch and Human Organs-on-Chips, a micro-device lined with living human cells to mimic the complex tissue structures of the human body.