Type 'ceo' into your iPhone keyboard for a sexist surprise
Hey! Did you know that 68 percent of the people who work at Apple are dudes? That tech darlings like Uber have rampant sexism problems? And that only 4 percent of CEOs in the Fortune 500 are women?
And who would have thought it: That male-dominated culture seems to have dripped into something as innocent as your iPhone's emoji suggestions.
SEE ALSO:Two determined women take on tech industry sexism in a new Secret adIf you type in leadership roles like "ceo," "cfo" or "cto" using the default keyboard in iOS, the emoji it suggests will be the default male in a suit, Mashable noticed Friday—even if you include a gendered context word like "she's" in the sentence you're composing.
Men, men, men! Just like you'd see in Silicon Valley.
Some caveats: We're not entirely sure how Apple's predictive text suggestions work, particularly when it comes to emoji, which were added as options only last year. The company did not immediately respond to our request for comment. Predictive text supposedly learns from your own texting habits, though it's possible that it also pulls in some aggregate data from other users to make better suggestions.
There may also be a technical reason this is happening. Emoji are created using a standard called Unicode. A man's face is generated using the code U+1F468, while a female is generated with U+1F469. Because the code for a female character is a number higher than the code for a male, it's possible that the dude comes up by default. (See that? She's already a step behind.)
Whatever the case, a number of Mashable staffers tried typing in the terms and confirmed that the emoji worked the same way by default for acronyms like "CFO" on their iPhones. You may see something different depending on your autofill or predictive text settings.
In all fairness to Apple, iOS has generally been ahead of the competition when it comes to diverse emoji. It proposed female emoji variations for a few new professions last year, and if you type in one of them—firefighter, say—you'll get an emoji prediction for each gender:
Note also that the female businesswoman emoji sometimes issuggested alongside her male counterpart: Capitalize "CEO" rather than using all lowercase and she will appear (not that anyone texts with Caps Lock on).
The female businesswoman also appears when you use iOS 10's "emoji replacement" option, which highlights key words that can be replaced by the iconic little characters. Better yet, she's even displayed ahead of that doofy guy with the mustache:
So, no, this isn't a crisis per sefor gender equality, but it does speak to how teeny biases can be communicated in everyday scenarios. Egregious? No. But worth considering in some layer of the massive dirt pie that is Big Tech's sexism problems? Absolutely.
Thanks for the tip, Shelby Simon! Freia Lobo contributed reporting.
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