Pregnant man and person: What do the new emojis mean?

With 200 new emojis on the way, there’s a man with a swollen belly and interracial handshakes in the new update

Emoji 14.0 brings over 200 more emojis to your screen, with the new offerings promising to be more inclusive to users.

There are male and gender-neutral versions of the pregnant woman emoji, which were a part of an initiative to “display gender-inclusive emoji designs from 2019 onward,” according to the proposal for the pregnant man emoji.

“One’s sex does not dictate the capacity to care for children in the home or work in the market. In the same way, sex equality law has aimed to combat harmful sex stereotypes, there is a great deal of parallels regarding how one’s sex does not dictate the capacity to carry children,” the proposal goes on to say.

The emojis are also aimed to be used in multiple contexts, with the proposal citing examples such as using the pregnant man emoji to denote that “uncomfortable feeling after you ate too much at lunch”.

Since emojis are often used on an individual basis and their meanings can be fluid depending on the context, the proposal suggests these new emojis have value as an “emoji expression”.

Frequency data also indicated that both pregnant people and pregnant-man were over the median search threshold, indicating that people are already searching for this type of content.

The new update also will include 25 different skin tone variations for handshakes, improving the diversity of the current emojis.

Google released a blog post that claimed the multi-skin toned handshake emojis have been “years in the making,” however, it claimed that creating a new emoji can take up to two years and that the Coronavirus also delayed production by six months.

The proposal for the new handshake emojis suggested that these new additions would be widely used, as the handshake is the sixth most used in order of median frequency, and would be the first emoji “depicting the physical agreement amongst two people of different skintones in a way that is not explicitly romantic in nature”.

Each emoji is subject to change prior to the final approval in September. The new update will hit phones either in late 2021 or throughout 2022.