Shown is a man, woman, girl family, but every 2 adult 1 child family now shows the same, with similar icons for the other numbers of each.
Actually it looks like Google still represents women and girls in the new ugly icons, but man and person (gender neutral) show up the same as do boy and child (gender neutral).
This is literally no steps forward, many steps back. Especially for Apple, wiping out both sexual orientation and gender representation. And Google conflating male and gender neutral is pretty bad too. I see no good reason for this change, not even a profit-motivated reason. I think it might have something to do with representing race. i.e. a silhouette is more race neutral than yellow. But they could just support mixed race families instead.
Microsoft on the other hand supports all the possible family combinations of both gender and skin tone, which Apple and Google never supported. Here’s the built in Windows 11 tool to make a family. Each person’s gender and skin tone can be changed.
Tangent: on the other hand, Microsoft refuses to support country flag emojis for some reason which is annoying.
I think it’s so that they don’t have to make politically motivated decisions on which flags to include
There’s no decision to make, the flags are based on ISO two letter country codes, so just include all valid country codes. For country level disputes like China/Taiwan and Palestine/Israel, both sides are represented. For civil wars like Yemen they just go with the UN recognized government’s flag (🇦🇫 the Afghanistan flag is still the Islamic Republic across all vendors rather than the Islamic Emirate). Apple and Google do that and afaik they haven’t gotten any backlash.
Apple does block the Taiwan emoji in China, though I haven’t heard of Google doing anything similar so maybe it’s just an Apple thing