That’s not just a cultural challenge, but a logistical one. A new word can be coined by anyone; for an emoji to be added to the lexicon, though, it must be approved by the Unicode Consortium, the Mountain View–based nonprofit that is generally charged with standardizing characters across platforms—making sure, basically, that when you send a character from your iPhone, your Samsung-using friend will receive the same character on the other end. The Unicode Consortium, though, is more popularly known as the body that approves the emojis that go on to shape human communication, one glistening pictogram at a time. This is the story of how one such emoji—a simple flat shoe, for women—has attempted to join the ranks.

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The problem became clear, as so many will, in the middle of the night. Florie Hutchinson was up in the in-between hours nursing her third daughter—Beatrice had been born in November of 2016, on the evening of the presidential election—and was texting a friend. Hutchinson happened, in the course of a message, to type the word shoe. In her phone’s suggestions field, a stiletto, fire-engine red, popped up. Hutchinson balked. “I just stared deliriously at the auto-populated emoji on my phone,” she told me. She began asking friends: What came up for them when they typed “shoe” into their smartphone keyboards? The answer, for women and men alike, came back: a stiletto, red in color and teetering in height, bold in aesthetic but stealthy in its implications and assumptions. Again and again, it was 👠 and 👠 and 👠 .

Hutchinson, as a public-relations specialist focused on the arts—and as someone based in Palo Alto, and thus immersed in Silicon Valley’s tech-saturated culture—and also, for that matter, as a mother of three young girls—was struck by the messages the emoji keyboard was sending, to her and to people around the world. She began researching: about emojis, about heels, about the series of events that had led the simple word shoe to map to one of that concept’s least simple manifestations. “Yes, I’m a feminist,” Hutchinson says, “but it’s not that I think that the emoji gods have decided to unilaterally make this a patriarchal structure that blah blah blah blah blah. I just think it’s one of those things that, at the time, to whoever designed it, it seemed like a sensible thing that women would immediately gravitate to. But with a bit of hindsight, you realize that this is systematic—and symptomatic of a greater problem.”

For Hutchinson, that problem wasn’t the existence of 👠 on the emoji keyboard (“I love the creative beauty that comes with a highly conceived and designed high-heeled shoe,” she notes). The problem instead was the 👠 used as her emoji keyboard’s default “shoe.” And, even barring that—following a recent iOS update, shoe now maps first to the Man’s Shoe 👞 , which is unsatisfying for its own obvious reasons—the problem was also the fact that, according to the logic of the emoji keyboard, women walk the world in heels. On that keyboard, Hutchinson realized, of the four shoes that are traditionally associated with women, three of them have heels: There’s a heeled boot, tan in color 👢 ; a heeled mule, open of toe and chunky of sole 👡 ; and then, yes, that ubiquitously red high heel. (The fourth is a unisex running shoe: 👟 .)