A Hopefully Non-Sexist Survey

[artisticdude]

Male (as most of you know... and all of you should, given my username ).

49 vs. 0. I'm not sure if this informal survey is really measuring players, or only users who waste their time in Off-Topic. If it's the latter then it'd explain many things. It'd also have some unfortunate implications regarding masculine intelligence around here.

I'd like to bring to light the possibility that perhaps only male players ever enter the off-topic forum.

[Zachron]

I'd like to bring up the possibility that most of the female players do not even come to the forums.

[Spell]

If kitty would enter the OffTopic forum it would be at least 85 vs 1

[Hulavuta]

That's another point. No one can think of any female forum member aside from kitty...

[Jozrael]

I will admit, even if it's not a representative sample, I thought female gamers were far more common.

[Speedbrain]

It's hard to tell if there are females around. It seems apparent there are none that frequent the Off-Topic forum.

I was curious about the picture thread in the Users forum. I did find 6-7 females in there, but none of them have been active since at least 2009 in the forums.

[Pentarctagon]

This isn't directly related to this discussion, but there was an article in The Atlantic called The End of Men, which which I thought was very interesting. also got my source for saying that women are less confidant with computers than men (according to the article men dominate 2 of the 15 fastest growing jobs: janitors and computer engineers).

[Zachron]

The article has clear feminist bias. lol. But it does prove a valid point. I would choose to have daughters as well as sons if I had a choice over the sex of my child. (And I'm sure my hypothetical wife here would honor at least one request for a son.) But let's be honest here. The portion of pregnancies in America that are the result of artificial insemination and invitro-fertilization are incredibly small compared to those resulting from natural impregnation.

I also take exception to the article insinuating that Males have dominated society since the "dawn of mankind." When historical evidence suggests that patriarchy is an invention of the past 5500 years.(more than half of all humans ever born to this day were already dead by that point...This is also based on when things shifted in Europe and the Middle East, this shift came much later in many other cultures... It's probably not the oldest shift... just the oldest such shift that we can trace the heritage of western civilization to. It's probably gone back and forth.)

Zachron's grossly self important rant on how gender distribution will probably rebalance

Overall I find the tone gets downright hateful and unrealistic towards the end. What it amounts to is, once the writer steps outside the facts, and into the realm of her own thoughts, she is grossly underestimating the male's ability to adapt. And she's grossly overestimating the advantage that females have in the modern workforce. Two out of the 15 most rapidly growing professions are dominated by men, but those are the only two out of the 15 where women are gaining more ground than men. In most of the other 13, men are occupying more of the new positions than women. Simply put, men have lower graduation rates, but the number of new jobs in a given field is often less than the number of people with the qualifications. Men are getting new positions more frequently than women are despite being outnumbered. And the pay gap is still real, the big dogs are still naming their sons as heirs, and promoting males in lieu of females. Males are also more prone to get fired than females are(although females are more prone to get fired unjustly still), so males will not wedge females out of these professions... but How does a 25% pay gap, a lower rate of hire, and a tendency to produce offspring(that even after child support will take more money from the mother than from the father... who makes more if he's in the same profession) translate into an economic advantage? A few anecdotes about educated women doing better in a post-industrial economy than their uneducated husbands do little to refute this. (if anything it shows that the difference within the two genders is greater than the difference between the two genders.) And even the statement that women are more prone to graduate from college is under dispute. I'm not denying that women are gaining advantages and have them... I'm just considering that they are not as sweeping as the article's author would like to have her readers believe.

If the gender ratio does go haywire. (I'm not one who subscribes to the theory that Fischer's Constant is really constant) A minority of males would result in the male gender actually getting more powerful. The majority of women are heterosexual, and if sexual orientation is indeed determined in-uterine (as most psychologists seem to claim at the moment) then the majority of women will stay heterosexual even if males become a severe minority. This would actually increase the coercive power a male has in a relationship, and the only ways to eliminate said coercive power would be to institute polygamy(which actually increases said power but spreads it too thinly to be an individual threat), or to do away with the relationship structure altogether--something women are as of yet not keen on...Although gender roles and gender-based attitudes are more cultural than biological, so that is something that could change...but females becoming less relationship centered might favor males becoming more relationship centered, which in turn pairs them up with females that remain relationship centered, which in turn gives stable couples a reproductive advantage over the unstable breeders in the form of dedicated access to a mate, an extra provider, and/or an extra caregiver... A sub-culture of (perhaps matriarchal)nuclear families would thus arise amid the mostly female dystopia, whereupon a male that is more desirable to the females in that culture would evolve and become more common. The growing power of this more desirable male would, in turn, create a situation that is more favorable for the establishment of patriarchy...which in turn may give rise to a situation where a less desirable male can and will evolve...

It's actually my opinion that patriarchy in most societies established itself in periods where males were the minority, either through a statistical anomaly, or a series of disasters, natural or man-made...some evidence of this is many patriarchal societies practiced polygamy early in their history but abandoned it after gender ratios evened out and precluded it.

There's also the matter that sperm sexing is not 100% effective. Some men shoot slow Y chromosome sperm, and in turn sire mostly daughters. Some X chromosome sperm will go faster than the others. Sperm-sexed invitro-fertilization, even if it replaces standard fertilization entirely will not remove males; it would simply favor males who were the product of slower sperm. This could fundamentally alter the pattern by which gender distribution actually occurs. Simply put, the more consecutive generations that employ sperm sexing, the less accurate it will be, as natural selection would favor sperm where the genders behave more similarly. It would take a deliberate eugenics effort to create a long-run reduction in the ratio of males to females. (for one thing, if males do become less common, mothers may be more prone to ask for sons.) Additionally(if sperm sexing in favor of X chromosome sperm becomes too commong)it could create the perverse situation whereby males are the only possible result of natural conception.

*disclaimer, I'm not an expert on any of the above topics... but neither is the feminist who wrote that article... and I can still rant about them on the internet just the same.

[CookieBite]

female thanks
im now the 1% outta all of you guys

[Dunno]

wooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
WE HAVE A FEMALE HERE!!!

[Telaron]

Me, I'm male. I'm glad to see that there is at least one female on the forum other than kitty. (I know there are others out there.)

[Hulavuta]

I don't think she counts, she only has one post. It sounds kind of like she just joined to change the Poll results. (If she plans to frequent the forum, then that's okay)

[Anonymissimus]

The fact that this was CookieBite's first post may hint that there are other female lurkers who just aren't posting.
Btw, the the user Desert_Shyde in the wishing thread (also offtopic) said she's female.

Hulavuta: Don't we want to have all wesnoth people in this survey, instead of only the ones who are posting ?

[Icarusvogel]

Needless to say, that result astonished me. A ration of something like 90:1 was much more male-centered than I expected.

@Anonymissimus - Of course it would be better to include all, but how do you want to get all Wesnoth players to this thread?

[Hulavuta]

Well if she hasn't posted a lot, it could possibly mean that the only reason she joined was to change the odds.