gender balance in 40k

[Gotthammer]

You're quoting 1st edition at me?! My fault, should have said modern. 4th or 5th edition - the one we play now. Female IG models have gone the way of the Squats.

That must be why there's so many pictures/models/female IC's. Sarcasm aside, a throwawar one sentence reference does not gender equality make.

Which is GW's fault, not the Imperium's. And one throwaway sentance is all it takes to establish that equality exists. By that logic they've never shown Marines going to the toilet more than the briefest mention - does that mean they're all constipated?

Just for more examples, the Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer has a check-off for the owner's gender, and the intro refers to "a soldier in the Imperial Guard... regulations by which he/she will live his/her life".
I doubt the Imperium would waste time with such niceties if there wasn't a significant portion of female guard. Also don't forget that we only see a tiny portion of regiments, and even then only a tiny portion of that regiments manpower - the fighting bit. We never see support guys (or gals), signals, cooks, drivers etc. Doesn't mean they don't exist or are some repressed underclass of Imperial society.

I disagree, but that's okay; a sematic argument here would be unhelpful.

Even if we're talking discrimination, all the examples you're coming up with are rooted in GW's bias, not that of the Imperium.
Lack of models & art is due to the misconception that female toys don't sell to boys, so they don't make the models, so they don't do art based on the models that don't exist. No point doing a super sweet picture of a female guardswoman that'll make veryone want to buy them if they don't make them (to note, I think the idea is flawed, but it is still GW - not the Imperium).

So the head of an all-female sect? What about the other High Lords? You know, the ones that allow both genders? Any women there? Or does the Imperium make women have to stay amongst their own kind?

Well can you name any of the high Lords? There is no evidence they're not all female either. There is evidence that any of the positions held by the HLs can be held by women.

Kind of my point: why weren't theyrecruited into the Sisters of Silence too? The answer: the Imperium segregates it's people based on gender quite a lot of the time.

SoB, SoS, Marines - the only organisations that segregate on gender. Also three of the six most elite organisations out there. The others being Assassins (take anyone), Custodes (who are also all male as far as we've seen) and the Inquisition (take anyone).

This old chestnut. Saying "this is the reason" does not make the reason okay!

But it does make the lack of representation in two thirds of the media (models and art vs fiction) not the fault of the Imperium, but GW. And I agree it is a terrible thing.

Sisters Repentia. Marines who fail are given the "punishement" of being made a Dreanought (if we're going 1st edition), or consigned to suicide missions (in their spiffy armour and with their honour intact). Sororitas who fail get stripped of their armour, and made to wear negligees made of purity scrolls, humiliating them (in the artwork), masks to nullify their faces so they're not real people any more, then literally whipped by a fellow Sister, forced to die as atonement. If they're really unlucky, it's the Penitent Engine for them! Truly the price of failure for a the toughest female warriors in 40K is so much worse thanthat of their peers.

So there's that.

Plus, just the abscence of female sculpts. For me, that's disrespectful enough.

So that's one, for which we can basically blame John Blanche... anything else? You did say the Imperium is the worst place imaginable to be a woman in and you've got one example of a small sub-set of a small faction. Hardly a compelling argument.
And again, lack of sculpts does not, in a background sense, make the Imperium a discriminatory place to live.


So I'll set you a challenge similar to the one you set me: find me a picture, model or piece of background that explicitly says all of womankind is repressed as badly as can be imagined by the Imperium as a whole, solely based on gender (not on the fact that their all female organisation is messed in the head, or it is a singular woman being punished - it must be the Imperium as a whole, ever facet of it).
That was your original statement ("because let's be fair; the Imperium is about as misogynistic a place as could be imagined"), so back it up.

[Duke]

Moving your off topic posts here...Play carefully.

Duke

[wittdooley]

I think the lack of female sculpts in the GW line is due to the fact that are far less people on GWs staff capable of sculping a nice looking female sculpt (or at least there were when the last guard stuff was released).

I think it's fairly plain now with the Dark Eldar release that people are clamoring for well sculpted female models. I think we'll see that represented, eventually, when the new sisters of battle frames come out. I'd be very surprised if, whever the IG gets an update, they did not include both male and female options for the set. Hell, I'd love to see two separate boxes, one for male, and one for female.

Only time will tell.

[isotope99]

Once you slice out the following:

• Marines & sisters of battle: (gender specific for fluff reasons)
• Eldar/ Dark Eldar: (mixed, even if the wyches are a little stereotypical, and fairly feminine shaped so easy to convert)
• Orks, tyranids, tau (not really relevant as they are asexual aliens by design)

You are really only left with guard as needing female models.

I think we will eventually see some female guards err. people when they get round to redoing the core plastics, probably a similar ratio to the craftworld eldar in the 20% area.

[Grailkeeper]

"I am an imperial guardsman trapped in a womans body". If its in an advertisement it must be true.

[Lerra]

Tau are gendered, as shown by Commander Shadowsun, a female HQ character. Every other Tau named model is referenced as "he" and looks male. Crisis suits and fire warriors are basically androgynous, though.

It would be nice to see a greater variety of female Eldar models, too. There's a lot of potential for great female sculpts that I think would sell well (check out some of the fan-made female Farseers). Most gamers would rather paint feminine looking females than feminine looking males anyway!

I'd also like to see GW play a little more freely with gender when it comes to daemons. Slaanesh is supposed to be androgynous, but it seems like most of the models are a mix of feminine and monstrous instead, probably because GW is afraid that having sexualized masculine models would be too gay. I ended up doing a lot of male Slaaneshi conversions for my army so that the girls and the space marines would have some more eye candy. There's also some great potential for female nurgle models that would make most gamers cringe.

[Denzark]

Duke I think you chopped the first post of drivel as I can't understand what the clack he is clarting on about.

[Baron Spikey]

Sisters Repentia. Marines who fail are given the "punishement" of being made a Dreanought (if we're going 1st edition), or consigned to suicide missions (in their spiffy armour and with their honour intact). Sororitas who fail get stripped of their armour, and made to wear negligees made of purity scrolls, humiliating them (in the artwork), masks to nullify their faces so they're not real people any more, then literally whipped by a fellow Sister, forced to die as atonement. If they're really unlucky, it's the Penitent Engine for them! Truly the price of failure for a the toughest female warriors in 40K is so much worse thanthat of their peers.

So there's that.

Plus, just the abscence of female sculpts. For me, that's disrespectful enough.

I love how you completely forget the Marines that are turned into Servitors or just outright executed (as most Marines who fail in as great a manner as a Sororitas turned Repentia would be).

Even the Marines who are exiled or sent on a nigh-suicidal mission have their armour stripped down to it's most basic function, they're not just shown the door and told to jog on.

Female Planetary Governor- Brothers of the Snake.

[Lane]

Female soldiers? Where? Model citations needed. Oh, and they've got to be anonymous grunts ('cause we're being equal here), not members of a special unit, special characters, or special releases.

Page 28 Codex: IG (IIRC 3rd Edition, published 1999) lower left corner has a drawing of an obviously female trooper.

There was also a female Catachan trooper with grenade launcher thoughI could not find a picture in a codex.

Given that this is the third thread you have started or lead into a discussion of gender bias/ unequal treatment you are starting to remind me of the dyke in my college history class. At least once every time period she would complain about how unjust women were treated. Eventually the professor said her rants were disruptive and it was pointless to apply current beliefs to the subject because history was not going to change for her.

If you can not handle the setting pleas pack up your armies and go back to playing with your Barbie Dolls.
I swear Eldargal and Lerra are more man than you are, and more woman that you will ever get.

[JamesP]

On the other hand Dark Heresy, claims that few women enjoy the same oppertunities as their male counterparts except within the Ecclisarchy where the numbers are closer to even. (page 30 DH core rulebook)

Dark heresy also produces alot of pictures of females in the rank and file, without searching through the entire book I can think of the Arbitrator and the Death cult assassins, the girl with the huge gun on one of the Chapter, pages, the female commisar, the Ordos girl (though I suppose she's not rank and file), the Queen of one of the planets, and of course the front page.

Interestingly, there is no comparable paragraph in the Rogue Trader RPG to that in DH claiming that few human women enjoy the same opportunities as human males. It could be argued that the setting of RT is outside of mainstream Imperial society and that a sideffect of this would be the (inadvertant?) emancipation of women but that's a bit of a stretch in my opinion. The development process for RT characters show that they pretty much all - with a few exceptions such as the xenos characters introduced in the supplements - grow up and start their careers in Imperial society so you imagine that female RT characters would suffer whatever pitfalls might effect female DH characters and that male RT characters would develop any chauvinistic prejudices that male DH characters might have.

This is complete supposition on my part but perhaps the developers thought there was no need to include such a paragraph in RT because they now think it doesn't properly reflect the Imperium? I wonder if the paragraph in DH would still be in a second edition of the game?

Personally, based on similar evidence as others have already quoted in this thread, I have always thought that the Imperium was as equal opportunity as any repressive, superstitious, bureaucratic and incredibly hidebound galactic dictatorship could be. The paragraph in DH is an interesting contradiction to that view - though one that is, in my view, outweighed by the examples that others have already put forward in this thread.

As an aside, discussions about gender in any roleplaying game or wargame that include societies based on elements of historical cultures - so fantasy games which tend to have a vaguely medieval setting or scifi games which have a science-fantasy element - are always interesting. I'll show my age here but the letters page in WD in the 80s, back when WD a) had a letters page; and b) covered non-GW systems, periodically had rather heated discussions over the roles of men and women in fantasy RPGs.

Every so often, someone would write in saying that any convincing D&D game world must have women in limited and subservient roles compared to men otherwise it would be historically inaccurate.

Someone else would then write in and point out that, unless historians and archaeologists had really been keeping quite about quite a lot of things, having magic, monsters and non-human sentient races in a game world would also be historically inaccurate...

The first letter writer would then reply and say that, no, it's ok to be historically inaccurate about those things but not about women and then the bickering would begin and the editor would eventually say that they weren't going to publish any more letters about this or answer questions as to why Citadel used to make a whole range of naked women in various stocks and torture devices...