Apple working to increase ethnic diversity in emojis

Apple is working with the Unicode Consortium, the body responsible for standardising graphic symbols, to expand the range of emojis or emoticons to include a wider representation for ethnic groups. Apple started the process after users protested about the lack of diversity and ethnicity options in Apple, by posting a petition on dosomething.org.

As the petition points out, of Apple's current list of emojis only two could be thought to depict a race other than Caucasians, specifically one 'man with Gua Pi Mao' hat, and 'one man with turban'. Apart from ignoring other significant ethnicities, the fact that the only icons for diversity are stereotypical representations doesn't help.

According to a BBC report, MTV brought the dosomething.org petition to Apple's attention. The company's Katie Cotton, vice-president of worldwide corporate communications for Apple, responded saying, "Our emoji characters are based on the Unicode standard, which is necessary for them to be displayed properly across many platforms. There needs to be more diversity in the emoji character set, and we have been working closely with the Unicode Consortium in an effort to update the standard."

The broadcaster had approached Apple when it came across the petition titled "Apple: Add More Diversity to the Emoji Keyboard." The petition, which has over 4000 sign-ups, mentions "There's a white boy, girl, man, woman, elderly man, elderly woman, blonde boy, blonde girl and, we're pretty sure, Princess Peach. But when it comes to faces outside of yellow smileys, there's a staggering lack of minority representation."

Speaking about the need for a wider range of emojis, an Oxford University research fellow - Bernie Hogan - is quoted by the BBC to say: "Emoji exist first and foremost as a way to augment texts with clear expressive power. If they restrict the sort of people who are used in the images it restricts users' expressive power - people won't feel that the emoji speak for them... There will always be more potential icons than you can reasonably put in a system. It can't realistically be the responsibility of any particular organisation or consortium to be able to provide all possible icons in a usable format. But that being said, in terms of racial diversity it's very fair to think the range should be extended."

Another example of the lack of diversity in emojis is seen in the limited number of food-based symbols, currently extending not much further than Bento Box, fried shrimp and sushi symbols. The presence of these three is explained by emojis' Japanese origins, however, the Wall Street Journal reports on a number of campaigns that aim to widen the Unicode's emoji list to including symbols for hotdogs, cupcakes, bacon, tacos and more.