Construction Worker

Building, fixing, or something not finished yet. Taken literally, it puts the message on a job: "roof's done 👷", "flat-pack day 👷". It suits professional builders and weekend DIY alike; context tells you which.

Taken figuratively, it flags a work in progress: a website, a plan, a profile or even a person still under construction, sometimes paired with 🚧. The base character is officially gender-neutral, though how it looks still depends on the platform's artwork.

Why is there a green cross on the hard hat?

It is Japan's occupational-safety symbol, carried over from Japanese carrier emoji. The emoji began among Japanese mobile-carrier pictograms. In Japan a green cross on white has marked workplace safety since the first national Safety Week in 1919, and appears on safety flags at sites and factories; it is not the Red Cross. Google's carrier mapping noted the figure as male in 2008, and early designs often showed a man; dedicated woman and man sequences came in 2016. The cross stayed on some artwork until Google's 2016 redesign dropped it, so hats still differ between platforms and versions.