Woman biking

Neither: the plain 🚴 leaves the rider's gender open. It is one of the emoji that come as a family. The base character is a person of no stated gender; the man-cycling and woman-cycling forms were added in 2016 when Unicode gave most sport and job emoji gender pairs, and each of the three comes in the default yellow plus five skin tones. Pick a gendered form when the detail matters, for instance when you mean a specific friend; otherwise the plain one works as the general cycling sign, even for a group.

If the plain one looks male on an older phone, that is old artwork, not a different character. Before platforms moved to neutral default drawings in the late 2010s, most vendors drew 🚴 as a man. The code behind the message never changed, so the same text can show a neutral rider on a new phone and a man on an old one.

What does it mean when someone sends 🚴?

They are cycling, just cycled, or want you to. Most often it is logistics: "leaving now 🚴" means they are coming by bike, and the time it takes is part of the message. Next come ride reports, the "60 km before breakfast 🚴💪" kind of post, where the emoji stands in for the word workout. In a plan, "Saturday 🚴?" is an invitation. During big races, above all the Tour de France in July, fans use it as the badge of the sport itself.

The tone is upbeat and literal. Cycling carries a wholesome, outdoorsy image in most countries, so the emoji reads as healthy, active and a little self-satisfied in the friendliest way. In places where the bike is simply how people get around, like the Netherlands and Denmark, it is as unremarkable as a bus emoji. There is no established slang or coded meaning behind it, which makes it one of the safest emoji to send to anyone.

Where does the cyclist emoji come from?

The rider has two roots. Japanese mobile carriers had cyclist pictures in their own emoji sets, and in January 2009 Unicode proposed encoding those sets so messages would survive the trip between phones. That April, standards bodies from Ireland and Germany proposed a bicyclist and a separate mountain bicyclist, filed among transport and map symbols rather than sports, which is why 🚴 still sits in the Transport block with cars and trains while its emoji keyboard category is sport. Its first name was simply Bicyclist, which survives in the :bicyclist: shortcode.