Pregnant man emoji coming soon to a phone near you after important update
The pregnant man and pregnant person emojis. (Twitter/@boohoo)
A pregnant man emoji is coming to devices soon after a list of new emojis was finalised at the Unicode consortium on Tuesday (14 September).
The Unicode Standard version 14.0 adds 37 new emojis, taking the total to 3,633 and adding more diversity to the existing list.
The update includes a pregnant man emoji, as well as a gender-neutral pregnant person, both in the same position as the existing pregnant woman emoji, who has her hands clasped over her belly.
It also adds skin tone variations to the handshake, which was one of the final emojis that couldn’t be edited to represent different races and ethnicities, and gender-neutral royalty to the existing “prince” and “princess” emojis.
Other emojis in the new update include “beans,” “troll,” “mirror ball” and “melting face”.
The update also gives the handshake emoji skin tone variations. (Emojipedia)
While the new emojis in the Unicode Standard have been finalised, it usually takes a few months before they are available on devices as companies like Apple and Google design their own emojis based on Unicode descriptions.
The pregnant man emoji was proposed earlier this year: ‘Pregnancy has been indiscriminate of gender throughout history’
The pregnant man and pregnant person emojis were proposed in July, 2021, ahead of World Emoji Day (17 July).
The proposal read: “Currently, emojis only depict people assigned female at birth in a role of pregnancy.
“If emojis are designed in a manner to be as inclusive as possible this emoji should present its gender more ambiguously.”
It added: “One’s sex does not dictate the capacity to care for children in the home or work in the market.
“In the same way sex equality law has aimed [to] combat harmful sex stereotypes, there are a great deal of parallels regarding how one’s sex does not dictate the capacity to carry children.
“This is not a new phenomenon. Pregnancy has been indiscriminate of gender throughout history but it is only now being formally recognised.”
