Real Men Don’t use Emojis
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Are Emojis Gendered?
Introduction
The area of research that this paper will deal with is Emojis. The paper will revolve around the perception of Emojis, whether they are looked at as a universal language or if the view is more gendered. The reason for choosing this topic is the ever growing presence of emojis in our daily life. A qwerty keyboard is used in less than 20% of phones around the world, whereas the emoji keyboard is used in a 100% of phones. (TEDx Talks, 2017, 00:53) By mid 2015 almost half of all comments on Instagram included an Emoji (Evans, 2017) . But it used not just for casual conversation, official economic documents like the ones released by the Obama White House, now archived, used emojis in the body. (White House Archived, 2014)
Emojis originated in Japan, the term itself meaning picture — word. They were created around 1998 by Shigetaka Kurita. (Danesi, 2017) It was created for the Japanese Telecommunications Company NIT DoCoMo. It began with just 176 simple characters.
But with the popularity of emojis in Japan, rival telecom companies came up with their own characters. And by 2009, the Unicode Consortium — the body that specifies the international standard for text across digital platforms — sanctioned over 700 emojis. They were available to software developers all over the world by 2010. (Evans, 2017) As of June 2018 there are 2,823 emojis in the Unicode Standard. This includes variations in gender, skin tone, etc. (Emojipedia, 2018)
With the use of Emojis on all digital platforms and their relatively universally understandable pictorial representations, one would believe it to be an effective and equal method of communication. But like all forms of communication, emojis too, are loaded with cultural codes and interpretations based on personal and/or collective experiences and of course gender. Other than the differences in interpretation, there is also a difference in form. Unicode doesn’t strictly regulate the form of these emojis across platforms (Unicode, 2018) Which means that one emoji, for example the ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ emoji which was the Oxford Dictionary Word of The Year, appears slightly differently on different platforms. (Danesi, 2017)
Even Unicode has a segment in their FAQs which state that the meaning of each emoji may vary depending on language, culture and context. They have also stated that Emojipedia is a good source of information to clarify emoji meanings. Thus the paper would regard the same as the definitive source for the intended emoji meanings. (Unicode, 2018)
Objectives
This paper hopes to help understand whether the use of emojis is colored by the gender of the user. Anecdotal evidence reinforced by mainstream media (provided below) suggests that Emojis as a whole, and not just individual emojis, are seen as feminine and sometimes even emasculating. This paper hopes to look at whether this is an opinion that is widely held, why and whether it affects the use of emojis.
A post on an IGN message board and the number one response to it. IGN is an American video game and media company
An article on GQ questioning the use of Emojis by “Real Men”. Magary proceeds to give rules on when and what emojis are to be used by these so called real men.
An article by The New York Times that stirred up debate for the question and content. It will be looked at more deeply in the course of the paper.
Review of Literature
Emojis and the function of Emojis
An Emoji is a ‘picture character’, it is a visual representation of a feeling, idea, entity, status or event. (Evans, 2017) With the increase in use of smartphones, Emoji use has been on the rise, earlier forms of “textspeak” like lol and it’s variations are now being replaced by emojis. (Emogi, 2015)
In July 2013, Matthew Rothenberg, an independent artist and hacker, created Emojitracker. It tracks the live use of emojis on Twitter. The grand total at the time of writing was 24.3 billion emojis, with the cry laughing emoji taking the highest share with 2.2 billion and the red heart being a not so close second with 1.07 billion uses (Emojitracker, 2018)
It is obvious from the above information that emoji use is on the rise in virtual spaces. But what function does it really serve?
According to Vyvyan Evans
If we’re to correctly understand that communicative intention, we need to go beyond words. Non verbal cues — a wink or a smile — help us figure out what someone means, what the intentional signal might be, lying behind their words. And in the context of digital communication, here Emoji makes a powerful contribution. (2017)
This is perhaps best expressed through the following images from a CNN article regarding the emojis (Senthilingam, 2017)
Emojis become important for the conveyance of meaning in virtual spaces; a replacement of sorts for paralinguistics, body postures, facial expressions, gesticulated and emblematic gestures which are not available for use in texting, tweeting, instagramming, etc.
Gendered differences in communication
To understand the claim of gendered emoji use, one has to first understand the claimed difference of communication between men and women. (This paper looks at the gender binary so as to explore the intensified and rigid classification of the masculine and feminine traits)
…a statistically significant body of research has found that women are the more emotionally expressive gender in the realm of face‐to‐face communication. (Parkins, 2012) In her paper, Parkins, using a sample of Australians also showed that the data supported the carrying over of this expressiveness into digital spaces, where women were still found to be the more emotionally expressive gender.
Keeping this in mind, it would be plausible as to why there is a general tendency to classify emojis as feminine. It has its ground in earlier aspects of communication theories. But can this generalization be held as true and why or why not.
In a study done on Korean students it was found that female students were more likely to use emoticons to express emotion/intimacy and manage message meaning than males. (Hwang, 2014)
Gendered use of Emojis
According to Emojitracker the crying emoji (😭) has been used over 6 million times on Twitter, since 2013. A study by Brandwatch conducted in 2017 shows how 71.2% of those instances were by women. carrying forward the non virtual stereotype of men being less likely to express the emotion of crying. In fact even the most used emoji (😂) has a slight tendency to be favored by women at 57.4% (Brandwatch, 2017)
Articles like the one by The New York Times mentioned earlier tend to push the stereotype of Emojis being a thing for women.
Given their resemblance to the stickers that adorn the notebooks of schoolgirls, not to mention their widespread adoption as the lingua franca of tweens and teens everywhere, some people wonder whether grown men should be using them at all. (Haber, 2015)
This wondering out loud looks at one of the reasons why “grown men” cannot be using emojis, it’s used by schoolgirls and teens and tweens. It reinforces the idea that men cannot enjoy things enjoyed by those that are lesser than them. Yet this is still a question posed by the journalist, the article goes on to give opinions from various people on the issue.
Amina Akhtar, the editorial director of TheFashionSpot, a website, isn’t buying it. “If I’m seeing a guy, and he emojis, I feel uncomfortable,” said Ms. Akhtar, 37. “We’re too old to be doing this. To have a man in his 40s and 50s using emojis is uncomfortable to me.”
There’s no real reason attributed to this discomfort, expect for the fact that it’s only attributed to men and not women. Women are free to express themselves in whatever way but it becomes uncomfortable when men do the same.
Yet even when men use emojis it’s seen as a feminine thing to do
….(Gil Schwartz) has no fear that using them may somehow put a dent in his masculinity. “For a moment you’re Taylor Swift,” said Mr. Schwartz, who is 63. “If you’re confident in your manhood, you can certainly lapse into Taylor Swift-hood momentarily.”…
Only someone “confident in the manhood” can use Emojis. Branding them as something that has a Taylor Swift like quality is to have them seen as the ultimate symbol of femininity, which is what she was seen as during the time this article was written.
All this is not to say that the article was received without question, male users on Twitter linked to the article in their tweets and responded using emojis. Others responded with questions of the legitimacy of The New York Times.
Yet, the existence of this article and various others that echo these sentiments, show the need to study the field to try and provide a conclusive answer. Are emojis seen as feminine and does that affect their usage?
Conclusion
An opinion poll conducted, on Instagram, with a small non representative sample of 18–22 year old Indians showed that a large number of them (150) did not agree with the statement “Emojis are feminine”. Only 20 respondents agreed with the statement and out of those only one was male. Although the question doesn’t cover all the nuances of the issue and the sample was too small and limited, you do see that there is a possibility that viewing emojis as feminine is the exception and not the norm. Again this is an extremely limited question and there is still the possibility that individual emojis have gendered uses that reflect overall societally accepted emotions for men and women. Just as how these characteristics have spilled onto all kinds of media, with mens magazines and women magazines and rom coms(feminine) and action movies(masculine), it is quite possible that emojis too have been gendered, the larger research, free of opinion, has definitely shown that.
References
TEDx Talks. (2017, April 10). How emoji replaced QWERTY as the world’s most popular keyboard | Jeremy Burge | TEDxEastEnd [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsZBziJVzNA
Miller, H., Thebault-Spieker, J., Chang, S., Johnson, I., Terveen, L., & Hecht, B. (2016). “Blissfully happy” or “ready to fight”: Varying Interpretations of Emoji (Doctoral dissertation, University Of Minnesota, 2016). Minneapolis, Minnesota: GroupLens Research, University of Minnesota.
Evans, V. (2017). The emoji code: The Linguistics Behind Smiley Faces and Scaredy Cats. New York: Picador
Danesi, M. (2017). The Semiotics of Emoji: The Rise of Visual Language in the Age of the Internet. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Emoji and Pictographs — FAQs.(2018, October) Retrieved from http://unicode.org/faq/emoji_dingbats.html
Emoji Statistics. (2018, June). Retrieved from https://emojipedia.org/stats/
Magary, D. (2017, April 25). Do Real Men Emoji? GQ.
Haber, M. (2015, April 3). Should Grown Men Use Emoji? The New York Times
2015 Emoji Report (pp. 6–7, Rep.). (n.d.). Emogi. Retrieved from http://cdn.emogi.com/docs/reports/2015_emoji_report.pdf
Rothenberg, M. (2013, July 4). Retrieved November 26, 2018, from http://emojitracker.com/
Senthilingam, M. (2017, January 18). What your emojis say about you. CNN. Retrieved from https://edition.cnn.com/2017/01/18/health/emoji-use-personality-traits-study/index.html
Parkins, R. (2012). Gender and Emotional Expressiveness: An Analysis of Prosodic Features in Emotional Expression (Doctoral dissertation, Griffith University, 2012) (pp. 46–54). Griffith Working Papers in Pragmatics and Intercultural Communication.
Hwang HS (2014) Gender Differences in Emoticon Use on Mobile Text Messaging: Evidence from a Korean Sample. Int J Journalism Mass Comm 1: 107. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.15344/2349-2635/2014/107
Joyce, G. (2017, January 31). Emoji Data Reveals How Men and Women Illustrate Their Tweets. Retrieved from https://www.brandwatch.com/blog/react-gender-emoji-data/.
