Women’s Room Emoji

The women's restroom sign: a stick figure wearing what appears to be a triangular skirt or dress, displayed in a blue square. Unicode calls it U+1F6BAU+1F6BA WOMENS SYMBOL. It's the same pictogram you'd see bolted to a bathroom door in any airport, mall, or highway rest stop on Earth.

In texting, 🚺 is mostly functional: "where's the bathroom 🚺" or directing someone to facilities. But the symbol itself has a surprisingly deep history. The stick-figure woman in a triangular dress was designed by Roger Cook and Don Shanosky for the US Department of Transportation in 1974, building on pictogram work from the Tokyo 1964 and Munich 1972 Olympics. Those little stick figures have become so universal that most people don't even see them as designed objects. They're just... there.

That universality hasn't stopped criticism. In 2015, the "It Was Never a Dress" campaign reimagined the triangular shape as a superhero cape, challenging the assumption that a woman is defined by a skirt. The image went viral and inspired over 50 million people worldwide.

Honestly, most people don't text this emoji very often. It's functional rather than expressive. You'll see it in travel contexts (asking where the restroom is), in accessibility guides, and occasionally in gender identity discussions on social media.

When it does appear in less literal contexts, it's usually as part of a broader conversation about gendered spaces, women's rights, or feminism. Some people use 🚺 alongside ♀️ or 👩 as a shorthand for "women" or "women's issues." It also shows up in debates about gender-neutral restrooms, where the question of whether we even need gendered signs is front and center.

The story of 🚺 is really the story of how a stick figure in a triangle became the most recognized symbol for "women" on Earth.

Gender-segregated restrooms are surprisingly recent. The first recorded instance was a Parisian ball in 1739 that put chamber pots in separate rooms for men and women. For most of the 1800s, public facilities were men-only, which meant women had to plan their outings around the availability of private homes. Massachusetts passed the first US law requiring workplaces that employed women to have separate restrooms in 1887. By the 1920s, such laws were the norm.

The pictogram we know today evolved through three design milestones. The 1964 Tokyo Olympics created the first coordinated set of pictograms (including restroom signs) to communicate with international visitors who couldn't read Japanese. Otl Aicher refined the approach for the 1972 Munich Olympics, creating the streamlined stick figures that influenced everything after. Then in 1974, the US Department of Transportation commissioned AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) to develop the definitive set. Designers Roger Cook and Don Shanosky drew hundreds of sketches, surveyed pictograms from Tokyo to Munich, and produced 34 copyright-free symbols that became the global standard. The woman-with-triangular-dress was one of them.

Unicode encoded it in 2010 as U+1F6BAU+1F6BA WOMENS SYMBOL, part of the Transport and Map Symbols block.

• 🇯🇵
  Tokyo 1964: First coordinated international pictogram set. 20 sport pictograms + 39 information signs (including restrooms) to communicate with visitors who couldn't read Japanese. Art director Masaru Katzumie and designer Yoshiro Yamashita.
• 🇩🇪
  Munich 1972: Otl Aicher refined the stick figures into the clean, geometric style we know today. He consulted with Tokyo's designers. His icons for men's and women's restrooms are the direct ancestors of every bathroom sign you've ever seen.
• 🇺🇸
  DOT/AIGA 1974: Roger Cook and Don Shanosky produced 34 copyright-free symbols for the US Department of Transportation. They drew hundreds of sketches on tracing paper. The symbols won a Presidential Design Award and became the global default.

1. 1739First recorded gender-segregated restroom at a Parisian ball↗
2. 1887Massachusetts passes first US law requiring separate workplace restrooms for women↗
3. 1964Tokyo Olympics creates first coordinated international pictogram set including restroom signs↗
4. 1972Otl Aicher designs refined stick figures for Munich Olympics, influencing all subsequent restroom signage↗
5. 1974Roger Cook and Don Shanosky design the DOT/AIGA symbol set (34 copyright-free pictograms) for the US Department of Transportation↗
6. 2010Encoded in Unicode 6.0 as U+1F6BA WOMENS SYMBOL
7. 2015"It Was Never a Dress" campaign reimagines the triangular shape as a superhero cape↗

The stick-figure-in-a-dress design is nearly universal, but not quite. Poland uses geometric shapes instead: a circle (○) for women and an inverted triangle (▽) for men. These were designed by Samuel Genensky, an American computer scientist with limited vision, to be "readable" through touch like Braille. The system confuses virtually every tourist who visits Poland because the shapes seem arbitrary to anyone who didn't grow up with them.

In Japan, restroom signs often include color coding (red/pink for women, blue for men) in addition to pictograms. Some Japanese facilities use text labels (女 for women, 男 for men) alongside or instead of stick figures.

The "woman = dress" pictogram has drawn criticism for implying that femininity is defined by clothing. In 2015, Tania Katan's "It Was Never a Dress" campaign flipped the triangular shape into a superhero cape, generating coverage in TIME, CNN, and the New York Times, and inspiring over 50 million people worldwide to rethink the symbol.

• •The first gender-segregated restroom was a temporary setup at a Parisian ball in 1739. For most of history, public facilities were men-only.
• •The AIGA/DOT symbols (including the women's restroom pictogram) were designed in 1974 by Roger Cook and Don Shanosky. They drew hundreds of sketches on tracing paper and won a Presidential Design Award.
• •In Poland, women's restrooms use a circle (○) instead of a stick figure. The system was designed by Samuel Genensky, a vision scientist, to be readable by touch. It confuses nearly every tourist.
• •The "It Was Never a Dress" campaign (2015) flipped the women's restroom stick figure into a superhero with a cape, challenging why femininity is defined by a skirt. It reached 50+ million people.
• •Massachusetts passed the first US law requiring separate workplace restrooms for women in 1887. By the 1920s, such laws were standard across the country.
• •The Tokyo 1964 Olympics created the first coordinated international pictogram set, including restroom signs, to communicate with visitors who couldn't read Japanese. These icons evolved into the stick figures we use today.

• •The "It Was Never a Dress" campaign (2015) by Tania Katan reimagined the women's restroom stick figure, flipping the triangular "dress" into a superhero cape. Debuted at the Girls In Tech Conference in Phoenix, the image went viral and was covered by TIME, CNN, the New York Times, and Cosmopolitan. It inspired over 50 million people to rethink a symbol most had never questioned.
• •The AIGA/DOT symbol set designed by Roger Cook and Don Shanosky in 1974 received one of the first Presidential Design Awards. The copyright-free symbols became the standard in every US sign catalogue and influenced bathroom signage worldwide. The woman-in-a-triangle is their most widely seen creation.
• •Poland's circle-and-triangle bathroom signs have become an internet running joke among travelers. Dozens of travel blogs and Reddit threads document the confusion of tourists trying to figure out which geometric shape means which gender. The system exists almost nowhere else in the world.

• •Codepoint: U+1F6BAU+1F6BA. Single codepoint, no variation selector.
• •Shortcode: :womens::womens: on Slack and Discord. GitHub uses :womens::womens:.
• •Part of the Transport and Map Symbols block alongside U+1F6B9U+1F6B9 (🚹 Men's Room), U+1F6BBU+1F6BB (🚻 Restroom), and U+1F6BEU+1F6BE (🚾 Water Closet).
• •The original Unicode name was "WOMENS SYMBOL" (note: no apostrophe in "WOMENS"). Emojipedia and most platforms display it as "Women's Room."

See the full Emoji Developer Tools guide for regex patterns, encoding helpers, and more.