BERLIN
— The choice of princess, bride or dancer did not really allow Rayouf
Alhumedhi to express herself in a chat room she was creating. As a
Muslim teenager in Germany who wears a head scarf, she was disappointed by the standard emoji options on her smartphone keyboard.
Why, she wondered, couldn’t there be a symbol of a woman in a head scarf, or hijab, like the one she wears?
She
wrote to Apple, but received no response. Some online research led her
to an article about how to suggest a new emoji, so she drew up a
proposal and emailed it to the Unicode Consortium,
which oversees standards for the symbols on keyboards. Her appeal
caught the eye of Jennifer 8. Lee, a former New York Times reporter, who
became a co-author of the proposal. She suggested that Ms. Alhumedhi
include a brief history of the hijab and add research to show its
importance.
“In the age of digitization, pictures prove to be a crucial element in communication,” the proposal
says. “Roughly 550 million Muslim women on this earth pride themselves
on wearing the hijab. With this enormous number of people, not a single
space on the keyboard is reserved for them.”
Women are increasingly calling for better representation on their smartphone keyboards,
which they say do not allow them to represent themselves sufficiently
in what has become an essential element of daily dialogue for many
people in the modern world. Four women who work at Google have also proposed expanding female emojis to reflect some of the professions in which women engage — business, education, farming and technology.
Ms.
Alhumedhi, who was born in Saudi Arabia and now lives and attends high
school in Berlin, began wearing a head scarf at 13. Although she has
never been harassed for covering her hair, she has seen people give her
some hard stares. All the more reason, she figured, to try to have it
included on her keyboard.
“We need to be represented with the amount of diversity, the amount of difference in this world,” she said.
In an online discussion on Reddit
on Tuesday, she answered questions about what the hijab meant to her
and responded to critics who argued that it represented the oppression
of women.
“I
would like to be represented and acknowledged,” she wrote. “It might
seem baffling, but when I wear the head scarf I actually feel liberated
because I’m in control of what I want to cover. The head scarf allows
for people to see past a woman’s beauty and see her for her knowledge.”
A
continuing debate in Europe over Muslim women’s covering themselves
escalated this summer, especially in France, where beach towns on the
Riviera sought to ban full-body swimwear known as the burkini. Many of the bans were later overturned.
More than 1,000 women who responded to a New York Times call for their perspective described their lives as visibly Muslim women in France and Belgium as “a struggle.”
In
Germany last month, members of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative
governing coalition called for restrictions on face veils in schools and
universities and while driving. The country’s constitutional court last
year struck down a decade-old law that prevented Muslim teachers from
wearing head scarves in public schools, saying it violated the teachers’
religious freedom. Still, regulations preventing women from covering their faces with veils still exist.
Many
Muslim women who were among the one million migrants who arrived in
Germany in the past year wear head scarves, and they have reported being
sworn at and spit on while waiting for a bus or sitting on a park
bench.
Ms.
Alhumedhi is flying to the Bay Area in California to present her
proposal, which includes an option for an emoji for Muslim men who wear a
kaffiyeh, to
Unicode’s full technical committee in November. If approved, it will
become a “candidate emoji” for acceptance into Unicode 10, to be
announced in June 2017, and would be adopted that fall.
One prominent supporter of Ms. Alhumedhi’s idea is Alexis Ohanian,
a founder of Reddit, who said he viewed her proposal as part of a
continuing effort to make technology more inclusive of women and other
groups that feel marginalized.
“Emoji
may not seem like a big deal, but it’s one more way for a lot of people
to feel acknowledged and represented — and that is a good thing,” he
said.
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