Powerful women welcome new female emoji

In honor of World Emoji Day, Google released a series of new emoji that are more inclusive of women from diverse backgrounds and all walks of life. A number of powerful women chimed in on social media to welcome the change.

"More than 90 percent of the world's online population use emoji. But while there's a huge range of emoji, there aren't a lot that highlight the diversity of women's careers, or empower young girls," Google wrote on its official blog.

To help address this lack of diversity, Google developers unveiled proposed new emoji depicting women in various professions back in May at the Unicode Consortium, a non-profit that sets international standards for text characters so that they appear consistently across devices and computers. Flash forward to July 14, and Unicode announced 11 new professional emoji with male and female options, as well as male and female versions to 33 existing emoji. Users also have the option to choose among a range of different skin tones to personalize the characters.

This move to offer a more diverse face to the world of emoji was greeted positively on social media by women who long felt their lives weren't being represented.

From TV powerhouse and author Shonda Rhimes to former California First Lady and journalist Maria Shriver to everyday women, the new emoji so far have received a warm welcome.

Google wrote: "We hope these updates help make emoji just a little more representative of the millions of people around the world who use them."

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