U+2640 FEMALE SIGN (♀) is a visible symbol representing the female sex and the planetary/astrological symbol for Venus. In Unicode it has default text presentation, but it can request emoji-style rendering by appending Variation Selector-16 (U+FE0F), producing ♀️ on platforms that support color glyphs. Conversely, appending Variation Selector-15 (U+FE0E) requests a text-style glyph. On Apple/iOS, the standalone character typically appears as a monochrome symbol in text style, and as a colorful, often purple, icon when the emoji presentation is requested.
In the emoji system, FEMALE SIGN functions as a component used in zero width joiner (U+200D) sequences to create explicitly female variants of otherwise gender-neutral person or role emojis. The common pattern is [base person/role emoji] + ZWJ + FEMALE SIGN + VS16, yielding a single woman-form glyph on supported platforms (for example, 👮♀️ for woman police officer or 👱♀️ for person: blond hair, woman). FEMALE SIGN itself does not take skin tone modifiers; any Fitzpatrick skin tone is applied to the human base emoji in the sequence, while the sign remains unchanged. By itself, the character is a standalone symbol rather than a human figure, but it is widely used in signage, biology, and culture, and is fully visible when sent alone. If a system does not support a particular ZWJ gender sequence, the components may display separately (the base emoji plus the visible ♀ symbol), which is normal fallback behavior. Historically a long-established typographic symbol, it was later employed to help standardize gendered variants within emoji without introducing separate code points for every profession.
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Emoji History The emoji code/ image log of changes.
