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.
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.
