Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[smeeprocket]

We do need more female protagonists.

They shouldn't be as worried making female characters.

I know I am afraid to write female characters but you know what I do whenever I am about to write one when I am afraid someone might find the character sexist?

I just reverse their attributes and find that... there is no way to do a female character in a way no one will find issues with.

I love the demeur elegant diplomatic princess with a pure heart and I like the cold battle hardened warrior.

gamers as a whole only care if the female character is awesome.

They polled kids about Legend of Korra and you know what they found? Boys didn't care that Korra was a girl so long as she could kick butt.

Also they REALLY got to stop caring that their protagonist is a woman. Seriously... we have enough "Woman needs to find the strength inside" protagonists. We need a Nancy Drew or a Wonderwoman.

Or heck Rosella... "My father is dying... don't worry I'll rescue a kingdom to say you... Also I am a master archer, know several instruments, and am quite adept at many skills". (and before someone complains. Her game is a reference to the first game)

Honestly, I think we could use a few more "Human needs to find strength inside protagonists." This includes men too, not just women(women not so much because I think we have quite a few). I'm so sick of all the male characters having the strength the whole time. They'd need to find it inside too. I'd also like some already hardened female characters becuase God knows in a world of sexism a woman has to try harder than a man to accomplish the same he could, but only because of that sexist environment. We are all equal and the world needs to start acting like it.

I would actually say that it's not that a woman has to try harder to accomplish the thing, she has to accomplish more for less recognition.

Ginger Rogers once said she did everything Fred Astaire did but backwards and in high heels.

[Quartz_Mace]

True, I suppose that is a bit out of place in this thread. Just thought I'd bring that up. To truly destroy sexism, we must have equality, so we must view both sides, but I'll try not to stry too far off topic.

Another thing that bothers me is female soldiers being portrayed as weak. If they are a soldier then they must be good enough at fighting, or else they wouldn't be a soldier. No, not all women can fight, but neither can all men. I wouldn't enlist an fat, sluggish man who couldn't shoot a gun into my own army, nor would I a woman too weak to handle a gun's recoil because neither can fight. If she got into shape, trained her muscles, and passed basic training, by all means let her fight, but nobody in their right mind would enlist a liability. Ditto if the man got into shape.

Yes, I know this was covered a while ago, but has anyone else been able to fully keep up with this mega-thread?

EDIT:

I would actually say that it's not that a woman has to try harder to accomplish the thing, she has to accomplish more for less recognition.

Ginger Rogers once said she did everything Fred Astaire did but backwards and in high heels.

Yes, I think that's a better way of saying it. Although, gender does still block somethings in a sexist society, but not always.

[Reelya]

The biggest issue is why there aren't enough female developers. I don't think this is primarily to do with sexism in hiring, because the gap starts massively widening 10 years before you're even out of college looking for a job. Women were even more excluded from medicine and law as they were from computing, yet numbers increased to the point women get the majority of law and medicine degrees.

Not a whole lot of women even start computer science degrees, so if they're not enrolling in the courses of course they're not going to even be in the labor pool for developers later on. And one tech pundit noted: most startup guys were progamming since their early teens. So that is the point in time that needs to change - the early teen years. If you're not starting to get involved in development by that age, you're seriously behind the 8 ball when you get out of college.

The computing gap starts in the early teens. A related phenomena is to do with female chess players:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/10844382/Chess-sexism-Compulsory-chess-for-schoolgirls-Will-schoolgirls-master-the-mens-game-of-chess.html
Plenty of girls 10-11 years old play but the number massively drops off around the age of 12-13, and "stinky boys" can' be the primary explanation, because the boys were just as stinky whether you were 10-11 or 12-13. Like a lot of things that are harmful but basically about choice, you have to change the internal culture within that group - it's peer pressure, but more about fitting in with other girls than caring what boys think:

I know what he means because I was one of those girls who dropped out. After winning my primary school’s championships aged 11, I quit chess when I got to secondary school. I knew I would never be a champion, so I stopped playing and dabbled in some other hobbies instead, using the free time to see my mates more. I didn’t feel like I was missing out, because, honestly? Chess was not cool. At all.
Chess still isn't that cool

The girls at NLCS chess club agree that chess still has a bad reputation but they get around it by not talking about it. To them, the first rule of chess club is that you do not talk about chess club. Elizabeth, 13 who represented England in the Under-12s, says: “If you talk about it all the time it makes you nerdy and uncool but if you don’t talk about it and just go to chess club, you’ll be fine.”

Steve Barrett, who plays for the White Rose team in the European championships, thinks this is why there are so few girls interested in chess. “I guess it’s because chess isn’t perceived as being particularly cool as an activity and the age when you’re getting into chess, which these days is pretty young, cool matters,” he says.

It's tangential, but I think you can see the correlations with "chess" and "programming", they follow a similar tragectory relating to gender. So how do we go about getting more girls interested in programming?

[Neonivek]

Aren't more women getting into programming right now?

Because the problem I thought was just that people weren't hiring enough female programmers.

If the issue is that not enough are getting degrees in programming... What the heck can be done about that?

It might fall to the nursing statistic.

And it can't be that there aren't enough iconic female videogame developers... Rebecca Williams is pretty much the Queen of the Point and Click.

And Lucy Bradshaw...

[Reelya]

No, it's dropped. It's been sliding down since the mid-80's which were the high point for women in computer science degrees.

[Neonivek]

No, it's dropped.

Why?

It should be going up unless less women are interested in programming.

I mean it can't be the math requirement because we tried DESPERATELY to get more women interested in the maths and sciences for years, so that should be going up as well.

[Reelya]

There's a graph here with one theory on the cause - home PCs which were mainly used by boys.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding

But it's a bit odd, since when the net came in virtually everyone ended up with a PC, so you'd expect the numbers to recover, but they're getting worse. Massively worse since 2000. The percentage of female computer science degrees fell more between 2000-2007 than it did from 1984-1990. Those two periods are the "slumps" which need to be explained.

[Neonivek]

Not to mention that there are plenty of games oriented towards women.

Maybe we should compare the number of female animators to Disney Princess movies.

*Checks*

Whelp... women don't like being animators either.... They don't like being Toymakers...

I am starting to think that men and women have different ideas as to what makes a worthwhile job.

[AlleeCat]

Aren't more women getting into programming right now?

Because the problem I thought was just that people weren't hiring enough female programmers.

If the issue is that not enough are getting degrees in programming... What the heck can be done about that?

It might fall to the nursing statistic.

And it can't be that there aren't enough iconic female videogame developers... Rebecca Williams is pretty much the Queen of the Point and Click.

And Lucy Bradshaw...

Let's not forget pretty much half of the reason Portal was ever a hit: Kim Swift.

There's a graph here with one theory on the cause - home PCs which were mainly used by boys.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding

But it's a bit odd, since when the net came in virtually everyone ended up with a PC, so you'd expect the numbers to recover, but they're getting worse. Massively worse since 2000. The percentage of female computer science degrees fell more between 2000-2007 than it did from 1984-1990. Those two periods are the "slumps" which need to be explained.

Fun Fact: My grandmother was an early coder for IBM. Ironically, she can't figure out her new Mac.

[alway]

Yep; posted that NPR article on the first page of this thread, along with my thoughts on it: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=146629.msg5882140#msg5882140

It pretty much comes down to a simple self-perpetuating lie. Both men and women become bad at things they are told they are supposed to be bad at.

[Neonivek]

Ok here is a controversial hypothesis...

Men and Women have different tastes in videogames and their developing interest in videogames is being met with a slower ability to change from game developers.

What genres have the most female representation? Games that men and women play.

Games that have the least female representation (or shallow female characters)? Games that men play and women don't.

Games that have the most female representation (or shallow male characters)? Games that women play that men don't.
-Hatoful Boyfriend is a parody of this exact archtyping.

As a whole...

Though this can't EXACTLY be true.

[Reelya]

Yep; posted that NPR article on the first page of this thread, along with my thoughts on it: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=146629.msg5882140#msg5882140

It pretty much comes down to a simple self-perpetuating lie. Both men and women become bad at things they are told they are supposed to be bad at.

But women have evened up the score with maths achievement, and that's hardly radically different to programming. I will bet they're correlated. I find it hard to believe modern girls both have all-time record of high self-esteem with maths and an all-time record low self esteem with programming. Those two things at the same time totally contradict each other.

"I can compute fourier transforms in my head, but I can't program a computer, teehee".

They're not bad at all at the skills needed, in fact they're better than ever and they clearly know it if they're topping exams. Yet they are even less interested in signing up for computer science courses than before.

[Neonivek]

One weird article I read suggests it is because women as a whole don't like "Toy jobs" so to speak because girls are discouraged from pursuing interest in "toys" after a certain age.

So while teenage boys might have model cars and have an open interest. Teenage girls wouldn't.

Partially they also suggest this is because girls mature earlier then boys, so boys get a longer age of prolonged adolescent interests with less pressure to grow out of it at a young age.

And I keep trying to find a statistic that disproves this... but WOW does statistics seem to support this. Any toy job I can think of other then clerk has a huge male leaning.

But I'll check Book Writers, script writers, and Play Writers

Book Writers: More men then women with women numbers increasing (but then again most readers are women)
Script Writers: Low amount of women and DECREASING
Playwrights: Low amount of women

[Reelya]

That might fit with some of the attempts about getting more women into engineering degrees too, more women were interested when they link the field of study to specific real-world issues that you'll be helping with, whereas guys are more than happy with "you'll be making cool shit" even if it wasn't linked back to anything concrete. So the guy engineers are perfectly happy with tinkering for tinkering's sake, but women needed it to be linked to something with more meaning.

[smeeprocket]

One weird article I read suggests it is because women as a whole don't like "Toy jobs" so to speak because girls are discouraged from pursuing interest in "toys" after a certain age.

So while teenage boys might have model cars and have an open interest. Teenage girls wouldn't.

Partially they also suggest this is because girls mature earlier then boys, so boys get a longer age of prolonged adolescent interests with less pressure to grow out of it at a young age.

And I keep trying to find a statistic that disproves this... but WOW does statistics seem to support this. Any toy job I can think of other then clerk has a huge male leaning.

But I'll check Book Writers, script writers, and Play Writers

well, female toys revolve entirely around child rearing, fashion, and relationships. I mostly played with boys toys when I was a kid. I liked Rainbow Bright though.

So the things that evolve into a hobby from toys for men (toy race cars to model cars to eventually working on cars) are expected to do the same for women, it's just it turns into you being a domestic.

And there's nothing wrong with that. I know plenty of feminists who are mothers and house wives, I just, personally, don't dig that. I think a lot of girls are discouraged from aiming higher in general. Having children really limits your ability to control your own life and destiny. We push that expectation on to women (and boy do you get grief if you intend to not have the little monsters) and it chains them down. Or you get this "super mom" concept where the woman is stuck doing all the domestic stuff, raising the kids, and working full time. That was my mom, and she made more money than my dad and was in management. tbf to my dad, it wasn't all sexism on his part, he has a debilitating mental illness, which he refuses to get treatment for because he refuses to admit it exists. He was very deeply depressed when I was growing up.

I remember I really just wanted to do stuff with him. My mom and I never got along and I just really wanted him to participate in my life. I signed up for little league and I imagined we would play catch in the backyard, just me and him. Yea, that never happened.

Anyway, that was sort of off topic. One thing you will run into with these numbers is that if the field is considered masculine, women just aren't going to get hired, and when they do, they will earn less pay for equal work. It's hard to figure out if women are being kept out of the industry or if they are turned away before any job application is involved. It's most likely a good mix of both.

That said, I've never felt like women mature faster than men all -that- much. Just getting your period doesn't mean you are immediately an adult.