A pregnant man and a pregnant person emoji will be appearing in a range of skin tones on mobile devices either sometime this year or next year.
Confirmation of its inclusion comes after a draft list by the Unicode Consortium, which included the progressive graphic, was released earlier this year.
When the Unicode Consortium proposed the new emoji - which provoked controversy in conservative circles - it noted in a statement:
"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 combat harmful sex stereotypes, there are a great deal of parallels regarding how one's sex does not dictate the capacity to cary children. This is not a new phenomenon.
"Pregnancy has been indiscriminate of gender throughout history but it is only now being formally recognized."
Emojipedia, a voting member of the Unicode Consortium, said that the pregnant man emoji recognizes that "pregnancy is possible for some transgender men and non-binary people".
In any case, the idea behind the emoji is that it won't exclusively be used to represent pregnancy. In fact, the Unicode Consortium believes it could be used to indicate that someone feels bloated after having eaten a heavy meal.
It said in its proposal: "This goes beyond gender … encoding people emoji with swollen bellies embraces how people repurpose emojis for entirely new uses. Finally, an emoji to denote that uncomfortable feeling after you ate too much at lunch."
What's more, this groundbreaking emoji isn't the only one that is set to appear on smartphones later this year or next year.
It is just one of 37 new emojis that will form part of the next release, known as version 14.0. As well as the pregnant man emoji, there will be a gender-neutral pregnant person.
Also included in the latest version are an interracial handshake, a melting face, a covering face with hands while peeping emoji, a saluting face, yet another tearful face, a hand covering mouth face, a seemingly provocative biting lip, a slide, a green troll, a spilled glass of water, a bird's nest containing eggs as well as an empty birds' nest and more.
