The tech and innovation sector has taken a step forward, according to reports in the Guardian and elsewhere; Google employees have proposed a new set of emojis designed to promote workplace gender equality.

These emojis would include female engineers, plumbers, farmers and chemists.The Google team presented the designs of 13 new emojis on Tuesday at the Unicode Consortium, a Silicon Valley not-for-profit group that runs an “emoji subcommittee” overseeing the creation of new emojis. (Who knew?)

Turns out there is a whole world dedicated to emojis and their creation.  You can read the full proposal here, and it makes for fascinating reading.  Here at Lucre Towers we’ve been going through Emojipedia and finding out if we’re right about the meaning of each emoji (the answer is yes, because we’re all about tech and innovation PR here).

Jeremy Burge, the founder of both the online resource Emojipedia and World Emoji Day (yep, that’s a thing and it’s on July 17 2016, so don’t miss it) was reported as saying: “It’s pretty clear that female-oriented professions are under-represented in emoji, and this approach is a clever way to address the issue now, rather than pushing it down the line.”  We couldn’t agree more. And… about time.