In 2016, the Unicode Technical Committee — the body that has final say over which emoji are added to the Unicode Standard (and thus, your phone keyboard) — added over 100 female-specific pictographs.

The news, in a year marked by Hilary Clinton's presidential run and the rise of 'wokeness', was greeted with acclaim. But for some observers, it was a tremendously short-sighted move.

"Adding gender to Unicode was a massive mistake right from the start," says Charlotte Buff, a German computer science student and activist.

"The basic premise just didn't make sense to me."

Shigetaka Kurita's original emoji list are a far cry from their modern-day counterparts.

In Silicon Valley terms, diversity is difficult to scale: as small pictographs on a phone keyboard, emoji cannot ever hope to represent all facets of the human experience.

"Representation by specificity is inevitably doomed to failure," Ms Buff says.

What's more, Ms Buff says Unicode seems unwilling to fix the problem in a systematic way.

It was a mistake to add gender, but "now that they have done it, they stubbornly refuse to actually do gender properly".

A non-female pregnant emoji

Since the 2015 introduction of Fitzpatrick scale modifier, which allowed emoji to have skin tones different to the Simpsonesque default, many have assumed further emoji releases would gradually decouple the pictograms from a limited — and in many senses Western, male and heteronormative — vision of humanity.

By these terms, a campaign for a dumpling emoji is refashioned as a triumph of the people's will. A back-end Windows update is a bold stance on interracial relations. And Unicode's latest emoji release, which allows for characters with red hair, can be reported as an "end to the neglect" of gingers.

"They'll keep filling in gaps," says Jeremy Burge, co-founder of Emojipedia, an online emoji database. "There's always something else that could be on there."

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Though even Mr Burge — who has been a vice-chair of Unicode's Emoji Subcommittee since August — admits this enthusiasm for ever more pictographs will surely run against practical limits.

"As soon as you start representing humans, you're opening yourself up to the fact that there's an unlimited number of combinations of people on this earth," he says.

Unicode has a stated commitment to gender-neutrality in its emoji design principles. But to Ms Buff, who has written multiple submissions to the Unicode Consortium on the subject, it's not a commitment they're upholding in good faith.

"Let me make this very clear," she wrote in a submission to the Consortium last year, "if Unicode wants proper gender representation in emoji, it needs to be able to represent pregnant people who aren't female."

Unicode have flagged that "more gender choices" may become available, but for the time being, gender implementation remains confused.

In emojiland, only men are allowed to be levitating business suits, women are the only permissible wearers of scarves. Only men can wear tuxedos, or a type of Chinese hat. Nonbinary representation does not exist for many professions.

And in a world where transgender pregnancies are increasingly commonplace, only women emoji are allowed to be pregnant.

A compromise solution

Gendered emoji are here to stay: code points, the foundation of the Unicode Standard, are not deleted once approved.

The solution, Ms Buff says, is to populate the currently missing gender options using existing emoji architecture: a Unicode character known as a zero width joiner can combine gender-neutral emoji (Adult, Child, Older Adult) with existing professions (Cook).

The latest release of emoji adds support for red-haired characters. ( Supplied: Emojipedia )

Think of it like a kind of arithmetic: 'female' plus 'Christmas' equals 'Mother Christmas' emoji. 'Adult' plus 'pregnancy' allows for nonbinary gestation.

"Unicode's open to it," Mr Burge says.

"They don't have any stance against any aspect of humanity."

If there is high enough demand for gender-neutral characters, Mr Burge says, more may be implemented.

But Ms Buff disagrees.

"This year [Unicode] added a softball emoji," she says.

"A slightly differently sized baseball is vitally important, but I guess there just wasn't enough time to consider transgender and non-binary people."

Tiger Webb is a researcher with ABC Language.