Apple embraces emoji diversity for iOS 10 roll out
Apple has moved to satisfy critics who’ve accused it of male bias in compiling its set of emoji characters by updating the character set with a slew of female faces for its roll out of IOS 10.
Previously male dominated sports and professions now carry a range of female faces.
Sports such as weight lifting, basketball and surfing now include depictions of women alongside female builders and private investigators complete with new skin colour variations.
New icons include a water gun in place of a revolver, a rainbow flag and two gender options for a single parent family icon.
In a statement Apple wrote: "This exciting update brings more gender options to existing characters, including new female athletes and professionals, adds beautiful redesigns of popular emoji, a new rainbow flag and more family options. Apple is working closely with the Unicode Consortium to ensure that popular emoji characters reflect the diversity of people everywhere."
Apple has been overhauling its emoji character set since May when it first submitted a set of 13 female emojis to the Unicode Consortium for their consideration, most of which were adopted last month.
The new emojis will be made available on the iPhone keyboard of devices enabled with the developer version of iOS 10 from today.