Something that bothers me...

[Melissia]

Maybe it's just the fact that the writers don't know what the crap they're doing, but it seems to me that there should actually be more women in the Imperium than men. A great deal of the men are conscripted into the Guard, or on certain planets killed off early in the attempts to find recruits for the Space Marines, or conscripted into the Skiitani, adopted into the Schola Progenium, or into the Arbites-- all of these organizations are depicted as mostly or entirely male in the fiction from what I can tell.

... and yet... somehow... most fiction that depicts civilians shows them as also mostly male (Dark Heresy, the Ciaphas Cain series, etc spring to mind). It doesn't really make much sense, apparently going by the fiction that there is Humanity in the year 40,000 is suffering from a shortage of women? Like out of every 100 citizen there's 30 females and 70 males? Personally I would think that this would mean there SHOULD be a disproportionate amount of women in the civilian population of worlds that are not entirely militarized (like Armageddon or Cadia), simply because of how many men they turn over to the Guard every year as tithes, and their own PDF as well which tend to be all-male in the depictions.

I know, thinking too deeply into science fiction (which itself is almost never internally consistent), but it always made me scratch my head at how stupid it seemed.

[Commissar Lewis]

In the grim dark future, there are only sausage fests, I guess.

[gwensdad]

Maybe the Imperium has lost the secrets of "women giving birth without dying". A oddly high mother mortality rate might start explaining some of the "off" ratio. That or we don't see women because they're doing actual day-to-day work and not acting as the idiot politicians.

[Kahoolin]

I know, thinking too deeply into science fiction (which itself is almost never internally consistent), but it always made me scratch my head at how stupid it seemed.

A lot of science fiction is actually very internally consistent. I guess there are limits to what you can expect from science fiction developed from a juvenile futuristic war game though

I have to admit I never noticed. There seemed to be females aplenty to me when I read Caiaphas Cain, but then again I'm male so I wasn't paying attention to gender balance at all really . You're probably right.

I can remember off the top of my head though, the civvy who becomes one of Amberley's acolytes in the one with the stealer cult. Civilians in general seem pretty thin on the ground even as background scenery, let alone characters.

[Commissar Lewis]

Yeah, 40k's light on civilians, because when you have machine guns that shoot rockets and all the other over-the-top weaponry, the collateral damage would be insane.

[Just_Me]

Hmm... You may have a point, though I do offer a few points that might go some way to account for it. First, despite the depictions in much of the fiction, all indication is that the Imperial Guard in many cases actually inducts from both men and women. The problem is the writers think in terms of modern terrestrial military organizations, which are almost all exclusively male, so that is what they write. The better writers generally seem consider this and acknowledge the existence of female guardsmen/guardswomen. Although on this note it is very odd that all depictions of Cadian forces to date tend to be all male, even though it is VERY clearly stated that they induct both sexes without discrimination, this can be nothing more than simple shortsightedness on the part of the writers.

Similarly, the Schola Progenium does train both male and female operatives, but most women who meet the Schola's high requirements for physical ability and mental strength are shunted into the Adeptus Sororitas (as Melissa already knows), and those who do not meet these standards are not suitable for service in any of the Schola's military branches anyway. So the drain on the male population here cannot be that much greater than it is on the female population.

Astartes recruitment is of course exclusively male (and if anybody decides to turn that comment into an excuse for another FSM argument, I will reach through the interwebs and throttle them), but it really is a negligible number. It has been stated that there are less than one space marine for every planet in the Imperium, and even if a hundred aspirants die for every Space Marine that is still functionally nothing.

As for the Arbites, you and I seem to have arrived at different conclusions, I always thought they seemed to be fairly equally distributed between genders, but maybe that’s just me.

The short version is that I think you overestimate the extent of the inequality. However, even given that all of these facts are true, you are still right that there should be some disparity in genders among the civilian population, but since we very rarely get much perspective on civilians in 40k, we might not actually be able to see it. From what little we do know, it seems that on any industrial worlds women and men perform the same tasks, the Imperium is after all and equal opportunity exploiter, so the gender gap is probably lost among the masses…

Generally speaking, I think what you are addressing is a failure of the writers, personally I have always assumed that the Imperium employs both sexes equally in most fields. But as has been pointed out most of the writers a writing for teenage boys, so they write about men, which is a real shame as 40k is a rich and complex universe that offers skilled writers plenty for solid mature stories.

[Commissar Lewis]

Well said, Just Me.

[Melissia]

With the Guard thing, I'm going off of Ciaphas Cain whom stated that most Guard regiments were male, with a few female and a VERY few mixed.

[Nabterayl]

That brings up something else that's always bothered me, Mel, which is this: just how big is the Imperial Guard anyway? I know the technical answer is "Nobody knows," but most of the orders of magnitude numbers I've heard suggest that the Guard is actually really small. It seems to me that it's consistently described in terms of billions, and the regimental numbers we hear are not that high either. The latest-founded regiment I can find on Lexicanum is the 840th Shock Troops. I don't know how many soldiers are in a Cadian regiment, but let's assume that shock trooper regiments are on the large side for the Imperial Guard, around 12,000 men. If the 1st through 840th Shock Troops were all under arms at the same time (which doesn't seem like an unreasonable assumption), that would mean that Cadia is only contributing about 10.8 million shock troopers to the Imperial Guard.

Of course, Cadia is a weird case, since presumably it has a permanent defensive Guard presence. Krieg, which probably wouldn't need Guard regiments to garrison it, only lists regimental numbers into the high 400s - again, on the order of a few million men in the Death Korps at any given time. And of course we have the example of Tanith, which raised a measly three regiments (and tiny ones, at that - 2,000 men apiece) for the first time late in the 41st millennium.

In short, I wonder if the Imperial Guard is actually all that big a drain on most planets' manpower. Every indication I've seen suggests that the Guard is only big compared to everybody else's army.

[eldargal]

Well, the IG fluff says 'countless billions' which could mean 10 billion or 500 billion. There is also PDF forces to consider, Cadia might only have 840 regiments but it could have hundreds of millions more PDF forces for all we know, who could be inducted into the IG as needed, one presumes. Krieg is a death world with small population that is sustained by Vitae Wombs. There could be hive worlds out there with a population in the tens or hundreds of billions with a capacity to supply billions of guard.
I just checked Lexicanum, it has populations for the hive worlds of Ichar IV (500bn) and Scintilla (25bn), factor in PDF and you have a huge body of men which could be mobilised into IG in a pinch.