Surely a positive trait is a positive trait for anyone to have?
Two replies:
1) That’s not how humans are wired.
2) The statement isn’t even true, e.g., “move fast, break things”, is good advice if you’re running an internet start up, but bad advice you you’re running a nuclear power plant.
I see you’ve done a large amount of market research—oh, wait, I don’t.
Have you?
Not even slightly. If you mean it’s contrary to popular narratives, sure—but then you’re not saying whether women do fight, only how well publicized their fighting is. Women fought in the African National Congress. Women fought in the US Civil War. In World War I, the US started officially allowing women into the navy and air force, while Russia had fifteen battalions of women—one of which had the moniker “Battalion of Death”.
But those are the exceptions, i.e., the distribution of women’s fighting ability is lower then men’s.
Women tolerate this because it’s the best representation they can find—but there’s less tolerance over time and more demand for women in all roles.
You’re conflating two different meanings”demand”:
1) demand in the economist’s sense, i.e., what someone would actually buy.
2) demand in the sense of complaining about the issue on internet forums.
I agree that there’s been a lot of demand (sense (2)) for it, but I get the impression that it’s generally from people who wouldn’t be interested in playing the games anyway, but are offended that they exist.
But the games industry is ridiculously male-dominated. The odds of getting together artists, animators, writers, and art directors who all agree to have a woman who isn’t crone, seductress, or fair maiden—you’ll get that in a handful of indie studios.
So? Nearly all the current game developers started life as indie studios, not that long ago in fact. Granted you do have the problem that there are fewer women programers.
Ah, yes, because some random terrorist group desperate for warm bodies to throw at their enemies
The statement isn’t even true, e.g., “move fast, break things”, is good advice if you’re running an internet start up, but bad advice you you’re running a nuclear power plant.
So what traits are useful depend on what you are trying to accomplish, right? Except you’re trying to make it be about biology.
But those are the exceptions, i.e., the distribution of women’s fighting ability is lower then men’s.
Yay, an unbacked assertion! This is so fair—you can spend a quarter second regurgitating an unstudied belief while I have to spend an hour hunting down sources. You know, people who actually care about finding the truth will generally help out with this research. People who merely want to maintain their current opinion won’t, and will instead just try to identify their opponent’s sources to find every possible flaw. I generally hoped to find more of the former here than the latter, but I’ve now been disabused.
Anyway. We’re already talking about exceptional people, so this distribution question isn’t relevant unless you’re arguing that women with decent fighting abilities are as rare as comets on Earth intercept courses.
You’ve offered no evidence of women being bad at fighting. We can start from first principles, then. Hand-to-hand combat with little to no training? I’ll put odds on a guy; these contests generally come to raw strength, and untrained, men have more strength. Combat with firearms with training? Women mass less on average, so they probably have more trouble with recoil. But the US Marine Corps accepts both men and women who weigh 91 pounds, so low mass must not be an insurmountable issue. Women unused to physical labor might have difficulty hauling standard combat gear, but then, men would too. The risk of pregnancy is real (and since transgender people are also discriminated against in the military, there’s no concern about male soldiers becoming pregnant), but birth control is widely available these days. On the other hand, talking about Far Cry 4, nobody seems to carry more than their rifle and a couple pounds of random accoutrement.
Okay, let’s look at how these women are actually performing. Turns out there isn’t much data—commanding officers tend to be squeamish about sending soldiers to fight when those soldiers happen to have breasts. But the First Battalion of Death seemed to perform well in the small amount of action they saw. During trench warfare, when soldiers in their region were ordered to push forward, most of the male soldiers refused, while the Battalion of Death went on without them and advanced the line several trenches. The regiment’s commander praised the First Battalion’s bravery in his reports. (And then the Bolsheviks executed Cpt Maria Bochkareva, the commander of the First Battalion. She chose the victorious side, but she was captured two years before the revolution succeeded.)
The Soviet Union in World War II drafted women. They sent most of them into medical or antiair specializations; all nurses and 40% of doctors were women, and Griesse and Stites report that antiaircraft roles were strongly dominated by women. Officially, women made up about 8% of the Soviet army. (Incidentally, a book I have about this notes that memoirs on this topic are notoriously unreliable—and then it uses someone’s memoirs to try to claim that most women didn’t serve in direct combat. The irony.) There were several bomber units that were staffed mostly or fully by women—the 588th, known as the night witches, operated obsolete biplanes for lack of proper equipment, producing 23 Hero of the Soviet Union awards for its 110 crewmembers. Their physical conditions were gruelling, heavy on missed sleep and missed meals.
On the ground, there were no Soviet infantry or armor units that were primarily or fully staffed by women, but there were many women who served as snipers and became quite decorated for their work. (By the way, our previous complaint about recoil? The Soviet Union during WWII issued a large number of PPSh-41s to their soldiers. These used 7.62x25mm Tokarev cartridges, which are designed for pistols. Same power as a pistol in a 3.6kg rifle means far less recoil. If you weren’t using that, you were using a bolt-action rifle—so the recoil just determines whether you get a bruise on your shoulder, rather than throwing off your aim.)
Still, even in desperation, there was typically official pressure to keep women out of combat roles in pretty much every country. Germany in WWII had a blanket ban on them due to their ideology—specifically, that women exist to produce and rear children and manage homes, nothing else—and had enough troubles allowing women into industrial roles that they’d taken up during the previous World War and subsequently been mostly pressed out of. The NVA accepted women in non-combat support roles for the most part, allowing them in antiaircraft roles at the start. The Communist uprisings preceding the war had much higher gender representation -- 40% of commanders of the PLAF were women, along with 60,000 regular soldiers and many more irregulars. Men in the PLAF claimed that women were inferior fighters, which is unsurprising—putting a female name on a resume reduces the perception of the person’s competence by a significant margin, and it’d be odd if this only applied to resumes where the only feminine thing present is a first name.
There is a general trend in guerrilla groups (remember we’re talking about Far Cry 4? That game where you’re helping a guerrilla group?) is to have high female representation. The Sri Lankan military reports that approximately a third of the Tamil Tigers are women. The Tamil Tigers are relatively effective; the Sandinista front won. Apparently it isn’t a huge disadvantage to have women in your armed forces.
Women fighting on par is unrealistic? The fact that only one member of the Golden Path is a woman is far more unrealistic.
I agree that there’s been a lot of demand (sense (2)) for it, but I get the impression that it’s generally from people who wouldn’t be interested in playing the games anyway, but are offended that they exist.
Turnabout is fair play—no, you’re wrong, spend an hour researching this.
The odds of getting together artists, animators, writers, and art directors who all agree to have a woman who isn’t crone, seductress, or fair maiden—you’ll get that in a handful of indie studios.
So? Nearly all the current game developers started life as indie studios, not that long ago in fact.
An indie studio can do it because there are fewer people involved and the owners can be more selective in their hiring practices. A large studio doesn’t have those advantages and has had enough turnover that the effects of the initial hiring practices are mitigated.
Two replies:
1) That’s not how humans are wired.
2) The statement isn’t even true, e.g., “move fast, break things”, is good advice if you’re running an internet start up, but bad advice you you’re running a nuclear power plant.
Have you?
But those are the exceptions, i.e., the distribution of women’s fighting ability is lower then men’s.
You’re conflating two different meanings”demand”:
1) demand in the economist’s sense, i.e., what someone would actually buy.
2) demand in the sense of complaining about the issue on internet forums.
I agree that there’s been a lot of demand (sense (2)) for it, but I get the impression that it’s generally from people who wouldn’t be interested in playing the games anyway, but are offended that they exist.
So? Nearly all the current game developers started life as indie studios, not that long ago in fact. Granted you do have the problem that there are fewer women programers.
warm body =/= capable fighter
So what traits are useful depend on what you are trying to accomplish, right? Except you’re trying to make it be about biology.
Yay, an unbacked assertion! This is so fair—you can spend a quarter second regurgitating an unstudied belief while I have to spend an hour hunting down sources. You know, people who actually care about finding the truth will generally help out with this research. People who merely want to maintain their current opinion won’t, and will instead just try to identify their opponent’s sources to find every possible flaw. I generally hoped to find more of the former here than the latter, but I’ve now been disabused.
Anyway. We’re already talking about exceptional people, so this distribution question isn’t relevant unless you’re arguing that women with decent fighting abilities are as rare as comets on Earth intercept courses.
You’ve offered no evidence of women being bad at fighting. We can start from first principles, then. Hand-to-hand combat with little to no training? I’ll put odds on a guy; these contests generally come to raw strength, and untrained, men have more strength. Combat with firearms with training? Women mass less on average, so they probably have more trouble with recoil. But the US Marine Corps accepts both men and women who weigh 91 pounds, so low mass must not be an insurmountable issue. Women unused to physical labor might have difficulty hauling standard combat gear, but then, men would too. The risk of pregnancy is real (and since transgender people are also discriminated against in the military, there’s no concern about male soldiers becoming pregnant), but birth control is widely available these days. On the other hand, talking about Far Cry 4, nobody seems to carry more than their rifle and a couple pounds of random accoutrement.
Okay, let’s look at how these women are actually performing. Turns out there isn’t much data—commanding officers tend to be squeamish about sending soldiers to fight when those soldiers happen to have breasts. But the First Battalion of Death seemed to perform well in the small amount of action they saw. During trench warfare, when soldiers in their region were ordered to push forward, most of the male soldiers refused, while the Battalion of Death went on without them and advanced the line several trenches. The regiment’s commander praised the First Battalion’s bravery in his reports. (And then the Bolsheviks executed Cpt Maria Bochkareva, the commander of the First Battalion. She chose the victorious side, but she was captured two years before the revolution succeeded.)
The Soviet Union in World War II drafted women. They sent most of them into medical or antiair specializations; all nurses and 40% of doctors were women, and Griesse and Stites report that antiaircraft roles were strongly dominated by women. Officially, women made up about 8% of the Soviet army. (Incidentally, a book I have about this notes that memoirs on this topic are notoriously unreliable—and then it uses someone’s memoirs to try to claim that most women didn’t serve in direct combat. The irony.) There were several bomber units that were staffed mostly or fully by women—the 588th, known as the night witches, operated obsolete biplanes for lack of proper equipment, producing 23 Hero of the Soviet Union awards for its 110 crewmembers. Their physical conditions were gruelling, heavy on missed sleep and missed meals.
On the ground, there were no Soviet infantry or armor units that were primarily or fully staffed by women, but there were many women who served as snipers and became quite decorated for their work. (By the way, our previous complaint about recoil? The Soviet Union during WWII issued a large number of PPSh-41s to their soldiers. These used 7.62x25mm Tokarev cartridges, which are designed for pistols. Same power as a pistol in a 3.6kg rifle means far less recoil. If you weren’t using that, you were using a bolt-action rifle—so the recoil just determines whether you get a bruise on your shoulder, rather than throwing off your aim.)
Still, even in desperation, there was typically official pressure to keep women out of combat roles in pretty much every country. Germany in WWII had a blanket ban on them due to their ideology—specifically, that women exist to produce and rear children and manage homes, nothing else—and had enough troubles allowing women into industrial roles that they’d taken up during the previous World War and subsequently been mostly pressed out of. The NVA accepted women in non-combat support roles for the most part, allowing them in antiaircraft roles at the start. The Communist uprisings preceding the war had much higher gender representation -- 40% of commanders of the PLAF were women, along with 60,000 regular soldiers and many more irregulars. Men in the PLAF claimed that women were inferior fighters, which is unsurprising—putting a female name on a resume reduces the perception of the person’s competence by a significant margin, and it’d be odd if this only applied to resumes where the only feminine thing present is a first name.
There is a general trend in guerrilla groups (remember we’re talking about Far Cry 4? That game where you’re helping a guerrilla group?) is to have high female representation. The Sri Lankan military reports that approximately a third of the Tamil Tigers are women. The Tamil Tigers are relatively effective; the Sandinista front won. Apparently it isn’t a huge disadvantage to have women in your armed forces.
Women fighting on par is unrealistic? The fact that only one member of the Golden Path is a woman is far more unrealistic.
Turnabout is fair play—no, you’re wrong, spend an hour researching this.
An indie studio can do it because there are fewer people involved and the owners can be more selective in their hiring practices. A large studio doesn’t have those advantages and has had enough turnover that the effects of the initial hiring practices are mitigated.