#emojipedia

Over the last four or five years there’s been a big project to think about gender representation in emoji, making sure that for people emoji they either have no visible gender representation (like the rugged up skier  ⛷️ or tiny tiny jockey 🏇🏿) or woman/man/person options (👩‍🌾🧑‍🌾👨‍🌾). To make the man/woman gender variations, the emoji is typically a combination of the ‘person’ version with the relevant ‘gender’ symbol (female: ♀️, male: ♂️), which are also symbols in the Unicode set.

Most of this work was done from 2019 to 2021. As part of their decision making, Unicode decided to treat the Person in Suit Levitating emoji as not requiring gendered options. in 2022 Jeremy Burge (former Chief Emoji Officer at Emojipedia) and I decided to do a bit of work exploring whether this was really the best solution.

Person in Suit Levitating (Google Noto version above) is one of those quirky emoji with an odd little history.

From Emojipedia

This character was originally introduced into the Webdings font as an “exclamation mark in the style of the rude boy logo found on records by The Specials". This levitating man was known as Walt Jabsco.

Person in Suit Levitating was approved as part of Unicode 7.0 in 2014 under the name “Man in Business Suit Levitating” and added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015.

So, Levitating Person definitely started out as male, and if you scroll through the different ways it looks for different companies, it’s still very masculine. Twitter and Facebook have created Woman Levitating and and Man Levitating versions, but these only work on Twitter or Facebook. Below is the Twitter Twimoji version:

In our proposal we considered two main factors. The first is that all other emoji where there’s no gender option involves someone (a) tiny, like the person using a parachute 🪂, or (b) covered by bulky, gender neutralising clothing, like the snowboarder 🏂 . We also looked at how people are actually using the Levitating Person emoji in a set of tweets. In that small set of data we found that people are using the current, still very masculine Twimoji ‘person’ as male rather than female at a rate of 10 to 1. Just saying it’s a ‘person’ and asking vendors to tweak the design has clearly not worked to make this emoji function in a gender neutral way.

Ultimately, the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee decided that the current levitating person was sufficiently gender neutral to not update. I’m sharing our proposal here because Unicode only publish accepted proposals. Perhaps someone will find this worth revisiting one day, and if not, it was interesting to consider and explore. For my own benefit I’ve added the Twitter Levitating Woman to various Slack and Discord channels I’m in.

Reference:

2022 L. Gawne & J. Burge. Emoji Proposal: Levitating Man and Woman. FigShare. https://doi.org/10.26181/21825762

See also:

Person in Suit Levitating (Emojipedia page)

Love the emojis 🤣🤣🤣

Apple otter emoji. Looks very cute and fluffy and is holding a rock. Her cute black beady eyes are staring right into my soul. I don’t know if it’s an approving look or “what are you doing with your life” kind of look and I’ll have to deal with that. Bonus points for the details and the advanced shadows. 10/10

Google otter emoji. It looks very sleek and round. I don’t know how to intepret her smile. Is she putting her paws to her mouth in excitement for me or did she just pull a very deliberate prank on me and is waiting for me to realize I’ve been pranked? I’m confused. 6/10

Microsoft otter emoji. What is is she. I really want to like her but on my computer screen she  looks like a poop or a slug. When I look into her eyes I can hear the static noise. Bonus points for the rock she’s holding and the bold choice of dark contours. 2/10

Samsung otter emoji. She looks relaxed and kind of cute, but also a bit slimy. I’d trust her with watering my plants but she looks like she’s a bit too talkative and doesnt know when to leave. 5/10

WhatsApp otter emoji. She’s very cute, looks honest and soft. I’d pet her belly. Her tail looks a bit awkward tho and I feel like she could profit from holding a rock, it would complete her careless but sophisticated look. 8/10

Twitter otter emoji. She looks like a cat. Why is she flying. Did someone shoot her into space? Her emotionless smile is making me uncomfortable. She looks fast. 5.5/10

Facebook otter emoji. She could be cute but her face looks a bit unsettling. She looks like E.T. Her upper paws are cute tho. Minus points for the lower part of the body, I don’t know what’s happening in there. 6/10.

JoyPixels otter emoji. This isn’t an otter, it’s a hamster with a long tail. 0/10.

OpenMoji otter emoji. Is she falling? Is she flying? Is she simply lying down? We’ll never know. Does she have a nose or is it a grin on her face? Is she screaming or is she excited? So many questions with this one. Very confusing. 4/10.

The shading around the glass is super dark, kinda reminds me of some LG emojis. I like the translucency of the scotch/whiskey, very effective. The glass itself is kinda boring tho. 7/10

This shading makes no sense whatsoever. The scotch/whiskey is much too dark at the top. The ice cubes would have been a good idea, if they were done even remotely well. The glass is really bad, it’s just bad. I’m disappointed. 1/10

I love the bold vector style of this, it works really well! The glass is really simplistic with just one tone of shade. I love the size and the way the ice cube is shaded, the silhouette is very good! I like the way they shaded the inside of the glass. Very good. 9/10

I don’t like this. The gray shading is too dark and you can’t see the other side of the ice cube, scotch/whiskey isn’t opaque like that. Why does the glass look uneven? Very unpleasant. 0/10

I really like this one! The gray isn’t too bad and it’s only a short distance before the gradient starts. The translucency of the scotch/whiskey is super awesome! You can see the bottom of the glass. Very pleasant. 10/10

Disgusting. I hate it. It’s not even a cylinder. It’s like they didn’t even try. Utter disappointment. Points for the ice cube -1/10

Facebook coming through againnnnn. The shading is amazing, essentially no gray at all. The highlight looks really nice. I do prefer it on the rocks tho. 9.69/10

Something about this makes me uncomfortable. The glass doesn’t really convey the fact that it’s a cylinder. The liquid also doesn’t look shaded right. 4/10. I don’t really know what’s bothering me about this.

I feel like they are trying to do for the vector style and they are failing incredibly. The ice cubes are literally so flat that I’m about to believe the earth is flat. The didn’t even try to shade the scotch/whiskey. -420/10

so now i’m gonna rate all the shrug emojis on emojipedia

this airbrushed man and his uncanny hair color disturbs me. 1/10

this one looks kinda outraged, but i can’t take it seriously because of the blank, soulless eyes. 3/10

this is a ghostly apparition sent to haunt me, but i’m kinda into it? nice and abstract, plus ghosts are cool 7/10

oh, samsung. why have you presented me with this wind-up toy of a figure. its mouth is too red and its plastic head is too shiny 4/10

oh! oh wow! that’s an actual person shrugging! great job, whatsapp! i’m docking points for the boob shading but otherwise you did it 8/10

the only shred of character in this image is the offset mouth. the arms come straight up and the wrists are bent a full 90 degrees out. it’s unnatural, but mostly unoffensive 4/10

i hate to give props to facebook, but this is a stellar shrug. she’s cute, she’s making a believable shrug gesture AND a great shrugging facial expression. plus, no emoji boobs! 11/10 i love her

this is a rantsona 2/10

this is a haunted lego minifig and i am equal parts pleased and terrified 5/10

why are they so mad at me. is it because they’re an anime? are you jealous of me for not being an anime? 8/10

this is the exact face i made when i saw this image for the first time. “why?” i asked. “why does it look like this?” 0/10

and i’m gonna throw in the one from my personal favorite emoji set, mutant standard