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[GoblinCookie]

At the moment it is possible for a female of any age to get pregnant, leading to rather odd situations where human woman of over 100 get pregnant.  It is quite possibly an oversight on the part of the devs and hence not in the dev plans so I had to propose it in the suggestions forum.  The obvious way to do this is to simply make it impossible for female creatures that have reached the minimal age at which they might die of old age and add a NO_MENOPAUSE tag to suppress this function and allow elderly females of certain creaturetypes to reproduce regardless of how old they are.  Alternatively the same track they might also be possible to add in a fertility decline age and a % per year, so the human woman gets to 30 at which point she loses say 4% fertility per year, so the odds of having babies would go down by 2% a year, so a 40 year old woman has a fertility of 60% while a 20 year old woman has a fertility of 100%, in this case menopause is simply when fertility hits 0%. 

On the general topic of reproduction, the birth of children also needs some work.  Pregnant woman (not animals) should go into labour as a job, stopping whatever job they were doing before and head to their bed or a hospital bed depending on availability and proximity.  There should be a midwife medical labour with a high priority midwife job generated once the pregnant woman reaches the bed, the actual birth is clocked to happen a certain time later, even if the pregnant woman did not reach a bed.  There would be a raw-modifiable chance of the female, the child or both dying in childbirth and the midwife's skill helping to reduce the probability of either event happening.  The world generation engine would have to understand the presence/absence of midwives in a given site in order to determine adjust the probability of childbirth complications happening.

[Ekaton]

I guess that this makes sense but I doubt that this is high on the priority list. Still, it would add some more realism to the game, although I believe that many might have their own opinions on how menopause works for dwarves, elves, goblins etc.

[Dirst]

Humans are among the very few species that experience menopause.  It just seems common to us because almost everyone we know is human

An immortal race that never gets elderly (e.g., elves and goblins) obviously has some mechanism of generating eggs after birth, and it would be up to Toady/modders if any mortal race shared that capability.  A tag like [FERTILE:12:80] might accomplish menopause while [FERTILE:12:NONE] would allow eternal fertility.  The default behavior if the tag is missing would be fertile from the end-of-childhood age with no end.

Conveniently, such a tag could could be placed on male creatures as well in case anyone wanted to.

[GoblinCookie]

I guess that this makes sense but I doubt that this is high on the priority list. Still, it would add some more realism to the game, although I believe that many might have their own opinions on how menopause works for dwarves, elves, goblins etc.

I do not have any reason to think that it is on any priority list at all and I think that it was an oversight on the devs part that we do not have menopause already in the game as it is; the game is supposed to be a story generating engine and it is a pretty odd to have a 100 year old human woman give birth and then die of old age a year later.  While the game society is extremely egalitarian in regard to gender (well gender basically does not exist) the game itself is extremely biased towards the masculine.  The things that have received a great deal of development/detail are all in our society what are considered male things while pretty much all female things are drastically undeveloped or absent altogether.  If you think about it childcare, cooking, cleaning, childbirth, pregnancy, family and romance in general (that is woman things) are in a sorry state development wise while we have developed mechanics regarding industrial production and such manly pursuits as hacking people to bits.   

That there is an unconscious bias in the devs priorities against anything feminine is basically why I started this thread, it is an example of the consequences of such a bias and was something that must be brought to conscious attention.

Humans are among the very few species that experience menopause.  It just seems common to us because almost everyone we know is human

An immortal race that never gets elderly (e.g., elves and goblins) obviously has some mechanism of generating eggs after birth, and it would be up to Toady/modders if any mortal race shared that capability.  A tag like [FERTILE:12:80] might accomplish menopause while [FERTILE:12:NONE] would allow eternal fertility.  The default behavior if the tag is missing would be fertile from the end-of-childhood age with no end.

Conveniently, such a tag could could be placed on male creatures as well in case anyone wanted to.

The idea of this thread was to implement the concept without having to make extensive changes to the raws, the menopause function is based upon the existing old age mechanics; the default behavior would for female [INTELLIGENT] creatures to stop being able to have children as soon as they reach the minimum age for potentially dying of old age.  Elves and goblins have no such age and so they will never become menopausal at all despite being [INTELLIGENT] while dwarves and humans will without the raws having to specifically say say.

We would have a [NO_MENOPAUSE] tag to make intelligent creatures that can die of old age become menopause.  We could also have a CUSTOM_MENOPAUSE:? tag which overrides the default behaviors to make a creature that would not normally have menopause (an animal or an immortal being) go into menopause at a defined age. 

[JesterHell696]

I do not have any reason to think that it is on any priority list at all and I think that it was an oversight on the devs part that we do not have menopause already in the game as it is; the game is supposed to be a story generating engine and it is a pretty odd to have a 100 year old human woman give birth and then die of old age a year later.  While the game society is extremely egalitarian in regard to gender (well gender basically does not exist) the game itself is extremely biased towards the masculine.  The things that have received a great deal of development/detail are all in our society what are considered male things while pretty much all female things are drastically undeveloped or absent altogether.  If you think about it childcare, cooking, cleaning, childbirth, pregnancy, family and romance in general (that is woman things) are in a sorry state development wise while we have developed mechanics regarding industrial production and such manly pursuits as hacking people to bits.   

Of the section I bolded only pregnancy and childbirth are female "things" and even then there are irl evidence that that's not always the case, its the male seahorse that is pregnant and give birth so nothing you mentioned is strictly a "women thing" in a fantasy world... as for the other things you listed its nothing but a cultural bias to call them female things.

That there is an unconscious bias in the devs priorities against anything feminine is basically why I started this thread, it is an example of the consequences of such a bias and was something that must be brought to conscious attention.

I disagree, I don't think its a unconscious bias but a conscious decisions to focus on things that are more personally appealing, managing weapon production and having battles is just more entertaining to the Devs and because DF is first and foremost a project of personal gratification the things that aren't as "fun" for them are pushed to the back burner.

[Lokamayadon]

Romance is a female thing ? I didn't know that only lesbians can have romantic relationships.   

[IndigoFenix]

It would make sense for this to be grouped together with broader debilitating effects of old age, which is curiously absent from the game.

It is worth noting that not only is death from old age completely random and sudden, the moment of a creature's death from 'old age' is decided at their birth and can be extracted from the game's code.  This is quite unrealistic and is probably a placeholder for when there will be other effects on a creature's general health, like disease.

All kinds of things about a species' reproductive cycle needs work (gestation time, parthenogenesis, menopause, death in childbirth, metamorphosis, and so on), and I'd prefer if it was all determined by the raws instead of having them be based on arbitrary things like intelligence.

[GoblinCookie]

Of the section I bolded only pregnancy and childbirth are female "things" and even then there are irl evidence that that's not always the case, its the male seahorse that is pregnant and give birth so nothing you mentioned is strictly a "women thing" in a fantasy world... as for the other things you listed its nothing but a cultural bias to call them female things.

I am talking in cultural terms not objectively, the devs are biased against things that are culturally female in our society. I am not proposing that the devs should implement those cultural gender roles in DF, or even that they should implement gender roles at all, which they at present have pretty much not done.  I am just pointing out that when we analyse the cultural gender of the various things that are highly developed against all the things that are undeveloped or absent, we arrive at a very clear bias against things that are culturally feminine. 

We have a world with a gender-less culture but which is itself mechanically biased towards the culturally masculine (in our society).  Everyone does the same work regardless of sex but the work they do is pretty much all men's work in our society, the female stuff is abstracted away despite how little the simulation abstracts away the micro level of stuff, which culturally female stuff tend to be concerned with.  This leads to a situation where we have both sexes doing 'men's work' and nearly all the 'women's work' magically does itself or is not needed. 

I disagree, I don't think its a unconscious bias but a conscious decisions to focus on things that are more personally appealing, managing weapon production and having battles is just more entertaining to the Devs and because DF is first and foremost a project of personal gratification the things that aren't as "fun" for them are pushed to the back burner.

Saying the devs are motivated by personal appeal is given the devs male gender really another way of saying unconscious bias.

The game is chock full of details that are in no way particularly fun but serve the purposes of player control and realism.  Managing weapon production for instance fits very much under the category of work rather than fun, I do not consider the mathematics of how many helmets, weapons, shields etc my warriors need to be exciting.  It would be far more 'fun' if all the weapons just magically got made off-screen by invisible weaponsmiths as they are in pretty much every other computer game.  A great amount of detail goes into the whole process of weapons production, training and combat because those things are culturally masculine in our society (not the dwarf society), not because in themselves they are actually very exciting. 

Childbirth for instance is pretty much the opposite to this, babies get born but next to no detail goes into pregnancy and birth, the babies just appear out of nowhere and the game does not even bother to tell us that a women is actually pregnant until magically the babies pop up without any work being involved at all including by the mother.  This is in direct contrast to the situation with combat which is needlessly complex and realistic for the purposes of 'fun'. 

Romance is a female thing ? I didn't know that only lesbians can have romantic relationships.   

It is a culturally female thing in our society but not objectively a female thing.  It is the women that romantic movies and the ilk are marketed towards and not men since those things are considered 'unmanly'; objectively the association is all nonsense of course but that is how it is.

It would make sense for this to be grouped together with broader debilitating effects of old age, which is curiously absent from the game.

It is worth noting that not only is death from old age completely random and sudden, the moment of a creature's death from 'old age' is decided at their birth and can be extracted from the game's code.  This is quite unrealistic and is probably a placeholder for when there will be other effects on a creature's general health, like disease.

All kinds of things about a species' reproductive cycle needs work (gestation time, parthenogenesis, menopause, death in childbirth, metamorphosis, and so on), and I'd prefer if it was all determined by the raws instead of having them be based on arbitrary things like intelligence.

The broader debilitating effects of old age are not quite the same thing, they really require other game mechanics to exist while menopause does not.  If we are going to make old age debilitating we are going to have to make warriors, miners and other professions that require brute strength retire at a certain age.  The absence of menopause on the other hand given it's effect on the stories in the game is something that is quite significant, the reason I am keen on minimising the raw requirements is that I think it should already be in game and the more raws need to be changed the harder it would be for them to quickly add something in that should already be in.

I do not think the old age death date is a placeholder, more a memory requirement since it would be impossible for the memory to cope with rolling 1000s of dice every year for every elderly historical character.  The only way to modify old age death would be to have relatively scarce random events modify the old age death number of the creature determined originally at birth, there is a limit to how common said events can be however.  Having another number to determine when menopause happens would be an option if we are going down the raw heavy approach of having individual variation but I would be happy enough to have a standard caste level menopause for everyone since it keeps the sillier family stories from happening. 

[Cormack]

That's some disgusting idea

[GoblinCookie]

That's some disgusting idea

100 year old ladies not having babies is disgusting: please clarify.....

[JesterHell696]

I am talking in cultural terms not objectively, the devs are biased against things that are culturally female in our society.

I don't think their Bias is against femininity but toward masculinity (they are neutral to feminine stuff), I would say that a preference towards masculine pursuits is not the same as an opposition to feminine ones, its an issue of semantics but an important distinction imho.

I am not proposing that the devs should implement those cultural gender roles in DF, or even that they should implement gender roles at all, which they at present have pretty much not done.

Personally I want cultural gender roles to be implemented as a part of the procedural generation process, then there can be patriarchal, matriarchal and egalitarian civilizations which is more entertaining then everyone being egalitarian.

I am just pointing out that when we analyse the cultural gender of the various things that are highly developed against all the things that are undeveloped or absent, we arrive at a very clear bias against things that are culturally feminine.

No its not, if anything I think its your cultural bias making you see a bias, as I said above a bias toward masculine pursuits is not the same as an opposition to feminine ones, supporting Donald Trump is not inherently pro-masculine or the same thing as opposing Hillary Clinton because of anti-feminine opposition of a female president.

We have a world with a gender-less culture

True

but which is itself mechanically biased towards the culturally masculine (in our society).

I see this as the problem, your cultural bias is making you look at it and say "oh the things we see as feminine in our culture are being left out, the devs are bias against femininity" where as I see it that everything that is fun in a game has already been claimed at some point in history as being a masculine pursuit.

Everyone does the same work regardless of sex but the work they do is pretty much all men's work in our society, the female stuff is abstracted away despite how little the simulation abstracts away the micro level of stuff, which culturally female stuff tend to be concerned with.  This leads to a situation where we have both sexes doing 'men's work' and nearly all the 'women's work' magically does itself or is not needed. 

This is because work that was seen as the foundation of civilization was culturally considered men's work while everything else was women's work and while childcare is just as important to civilization as hard labor it wasn't seen as such in most cases but in cases where it was then men actually got involved, its all to do with maintaining patriarchal social standards.

Saying the devs are motivated by personal appeal is given the devs male gender really another way of saying unconscious bias.

My point is that a conscious bias for masculine pursuits is not the same as a unconsciousness bias against feminine ones.

The game is chock full of details that are in no way particularly fun but serve the purposes of player control and realism.  Managing weapon production for instance fits very much under the category of work rather than fun, I do not consider the mathematics of how many helmets, weapons, shields etc my warriors need to be exciting. 

I actually like managing my fortresses production, then again I like games like Factorio and the old industry giants game, fun is relative after all.

It would be far more 'fun' if all the weapons just magically got made off-screen by invisible weaponsmiths as they are in pretty much every other computer game. 

No thank you, I like managing weapon production and the fact that it gets handled "off screen" in other games is something I dislike, part of what I liked about the stronghold series was that you had to make the weapon and armor for your soldiers.

A great amount of detail goes into the whole process of weapons production, training and combat because those things are culturally masculine in our society (not the dwarf society), not because in themselves they are actually very exciting. 

No, great detail goes into those thing because they are of personal interest to the dev's and while their personal interest in those things was learnt by them because they live in a culture that values masculine pursuits that does not mean that they are added to DF because of simply becasue its masculine.

Also some thing doesn't have to be exciting for it to be fun and I do find these things to be enjoyable.

Childbirth for instance is pretty much the opposite to this, babies get born but next to no detail goes into pregnancy and birth, the babies just appear out of nowhere and the game does not even bother to tell us that a women is actually pregnant until magically the babies pop up without any work being involved at all including by the mother.  This is in direct contrast to the situation with combat which is needlessly complex and realistic for the purposes of 'fun'. 

DF is a work in progress and because its a project of personal gratification things that are personally interesting to the devs go in first, I personally have no doubt that all the feminine things you mentioned will be added to DF as the internal society of the fortress grow more complex and eventually the daily lives of your dwarves will be as "needlessly complex" as combat is.

Also I personally don't think combat is needlessly complex, in fact after playing DF I find the combat in other games to be oversimplified... DF has ruined so many other game for me because I now think that they are all just to simple and abstract...

[GoblinCookie]

I don't think their Bias is against femininity but toward masculinity (they are neutral to feminine stuff), I would say that a preference towards masculine pursuits is not the same as an opposition to feminine ones, its an issue of semantics but an important distinction imho.

The bias is clearly against feminine things, since when implementing a number of masculine related things they could easily have implemented a number of feminine related things at the same time but due to the bias against feminine things this did not happen.  For instance, in manly violence warriors get injured, so we end up having hospitals and a whole raft of medical skills; however it did not occur to the devs to add midwife to the list of medical skills and to use the same kind of coding as for medical stuff in order to have the babies delivered. 

Personally I want cultural gender roles to be implemented as a part of the procedural generation process, then there can be patriarchal, matriarchal and egalitarian civilizations which is more entertaining then everyone being egalitarian.

It is certainly more diverse, however I would say that a genderless society is more fascinating and marks the game out.  The problem with the diversity is that gender roles are not developed arbitrarily but for some reason or other.  It does not make sense to simply have the RNG assign roles to the genders in Yr0 with no rhyme or reason to it and not very much is known about how the gender roles/patriarchy actually originated in the first place, why or when.  This means that the devs cannot model the process of the formation of the gender roles and gender hierarchy since there are no reliable sources they can read on the subject and hence they cannot figure out what conditions would lead to what happening.

No its not, if anything I think its your cultural bias making you see a bias, as I said above a bias toward masculine pursuits is not the same as an opposition to feminine ones, supporting Donald Trump is not inherently pro-masculine or the same thing as opposing Hillary Clinton because of anti-feminine opposition of a female president.

The president is a culturally masculine role since all American presidents so far have been men.  Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are acting in a culturally masculine fashion by standing for president, since it is something that women do not traditionally do in American culture.  If Hillary Clinton wins then the effect of doing so is that the president loses it's masculine status if she does not do a disastrous job of it, if Donald Trump wins that the masculine status of the presidency is maintained but less so than if Hillary Clinton had never ran against him. 

What the devs have effectively done is ignored everything that is culturally feminine and developed everything that is culturally masculine.  However just as with Hillary Clinton's presidency if you have enough women successfully a masculine task it loses it's masculine status, so though the devs developed everything with a bias towards the culturally masculine the game's genderless society demasculinised those tasks. 

I see this as the problem, your cultural bias is making you look at it and say "oh the things we see as feminine in our culture are being left out, the devs are bias against femininity" where as I see it that everything that is fun in a game has already been claimed at some point in history as being a masculine pursuit.

That does not matter since we are talking about the real-life present society and recent past society. 

This is because work that was seen as the foundation of civilization was culturally considered men's work while everything else was women's work and while childcare is just as important to civilization as hard labor it wasn't seen as such in most cases but in cases where it was then men actually got involved, its all to do with maintaining patriarchal social standards.

Correct.  The game follows the same bias though it has both genders doing all types of work. 

My point is that a conscious bias for masculine pursuits is not the same as a unconsciousness bias against feminine ones.

In this case both in effect and neither are conscious. 

I actually like managing my fortresses production, then again I like games like Factorio and the old industry giants game, fun is relative after all.

While there is no objective definition of fun it is clear that Dwarf Fortress is not the kind of game that simply depicts a small number of the most exciting things and abstracts everything else away. 

No thank you, I like managing weapon production and the fact that it gets handled "off screen" in other games is something I dislike, part of what I liked about the stronghold series was that you had to make the weapon and armor for your soldiers.

The game's approach to pregnancy, birth and the raising of children is akin to that; it all happens 'off screen' and we get presented with the finished 'product' in 12 years time.

No, great detail goes into those thing because they are of personal interest to the dev's and while their personal interest in those things was learnt by them because they live in a culture that values masculine pursuits that does not mean that they are added to DF because of simply becasue its masculine.

Also some thing doesn't have to be exciting for it to be fun and I do find these things to be enjoyable.

Which is another way of saying exactly what I am saying; the bias exists and the bias is unconscious, being cultural in origin.

DF is a work in progress and because its a project of personal gratification things that are personally interesting to the devs go in first, I personally have no doubt that all the feminine things you mentioned will be added to DF as the internal society of the fortress grow more complex and eventually the daily lives of your dwarves will be as "needlessly complex" as combat is.

Also I personally don't think combat is needlessly complex, in fact after playing DF I find the combat in other games to be oversimplified... DF has ruined so many other game for me because I now think that they are all just to simple and abstract...

It is a bias that has existed at every stage of development, there is no reason to think the bias will ever be rectified over time simply by default simply because there may be some extra development eventually of those things.  Much of the things I am talking about would have been implemented already had the game not be so biased, there was never a need to wait until some distant future date in order to stop 100 year old human women from having babies. The bias is harming the game storymaking purpose since aside from the 100 year old mothers it is creating stories that are focused on mechanical violence and production with no focus whatsoever on the human side of things.  Those things evidently happen but everything about the game functions to distract us from that side of things, what matters is who you kill and what you make.

[JesterHell696]

The bias is clearly against feminine things, since when implementing a number of masculine related things they could easily have implemented a number of feminine related things at the same time but due to the bias against feminine things this did not happen.  For instance, in manly violence warriors get injured, so we end up having hospitals and a whole raft of medical skills; however it did not occur to the devs to add midwife to the list of medical skills and to use the same kind of coding as for medical stuff in order to have the babies delivered. 

I disagree, my standpoint is that there is a difference between a bias towards something and a bias against something, even if the end result is the same the cause is different, Like I said DF is a personal project of self gratification and as such things that the devs enjoy or find entertaining get added and things the devs don't find entertaining don't and what gets added or not is a conscious decision on their part.

Take your midwife example, all that's need for the devs to consciously choose not to add it is is a simple "that doesn't interest me" and as we know the dev's will quite happily work on adding damn near anything that takes their interest regardless of if its next on the list of goals.

It is certainly more diverse, however I would say that a genderless society is more fascinating and marks the game out. 

I personally don't find genderless society fascinating at all and would say that having all possible societies interacting with each other is much more fascinating and there are many other thing which marks the game out then something as boring (in my opinion) as a world full of genderless civs.

The problem with the diversity is that gender roles are not developed arbitrarily but for some reason or other.  It does not make sense to simply have the RNG assign roles to the genders in Yr0 with no rhyme or reason to it and not very much is known about how the gender roles/patriarchy actually originated in the first place, why or when.  This means that the devs cannot model the process of the formation of the gender roles and gender hierarchy since there are no reliable sources they can read on the subject and hence they cannot figure out what conditions would lead to what happening. 

Good thing their making a myth generator that can give us reasons for the societies gender role development and given DF's setting an answer like "The gods decreed that man would rule over woman" is just as valid as an answer of "The gods decreed that woman would rule over man" or "both man and woman would be considered equal in the eye's of the gods" and even in low fantasy setting that can be used as the answer as that was the reason given IRL with the true reasons being lost to time.

The president is a culturally masculine role since all American presidents so far have been men.  Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are acting in a culturally masculine fashion by standing for president, since it is something that women do not traditionally do in American culture.  If Hillary Clinton wins then the effect of doing so is that the president loses it's masculine status if she does not do a disastrous job of it, if Donald Trump wins that the masculine status of the presidency is maintained but less so than if Hillary Clinton had never ran against him. 

Either you missed my point or I don't explain it well, for the sake of discussion lets say Trump = masculine things and Clinton = feminine things.

My point is that there is a difference between voting for Trump because you prefer his policies (my stance on the devs) and voting Trump because you simply don't want a female president, now I understand that some people will say there voting Trump because they prefer his policies while in actual fact they subconsciously don't want a female president (your stance on the devs) but that's not what I think is happening in DF's development.

What the devs have effectively done is ignored everything that is culturally feminine and developed everything that is culturally masculine.  However just as with Hillary Clinton's presidency if you have enough women successfully a masculine task it loses it's masculine status, so though the devs developed everything with a bias towards the culturally masculine the game's genderless society demasculinised those tasks.   

I disagree, I know a few people whom still refuse to allow female dwarves in the military and whom always choose a male dwarf to become count of the fortress, and in IRL there are many women in the military but its still considered a masculine thing, I think where both seeing what we want to see.

That does not matter since we are talking about the real-life present society and recent past society. 

No, where talking about DF's development and how you seem to think that the lack of feminine things is because the dev's are subconsciously bias against it while I think they have a conscious preference (bias) towards masculine thing and that I believe that while the end result is the same (a lack of feminine things) the cause is different.

Correct.  The game follows the same bias though it has both genders doing all types of work. 

I think I have to explain my stance in more detail.

I think that humans are born with a default position of neutrality (apathetic) on all issues and that over the course of their life they develop likes (positive bias) and dislikes (negative bias) based upon the culture they grow up in and various life events.

Now as I understand it your stance is that the DF dev's have an unconscious dislike of feminine things (negative bias) and as a result of this dislike choose to focus on masculine things unconsciously.

But my stance is that the DF dev's are neutral (apathetic) about feminine things and have a like (positive bias) of masculine things and as such when choosing what to spend their time on they choose to spend it on things they do like rather then things their merely meh about and my entire point is that I think there is a difference between a negative bias (dislike) of something and being apathetic (neutral) about it.

Basically I think they looked at it and shrugged their shoulders and said "do it later" because they had other things they liked and that they did want to work on.

In this case both in effect and neither are conscious. 

I disagree, saying I like combat and I want to disembowel my enemy's is conscious just like saying I don't care about midwives is a conscious, now I know your saying that the motivation behind these decisions is unconscious bias against feminine things but I disagree, I think its only a bias for the inclusion of masculine things with no bias against feminine and there is a difference.

While there is no objective definition of fun it is clear that Dwarf Fortress is not the kind of game that simply depicts a small number of the most exciting things and abstracts everything else away. 

Its also clear that DF's development choices are powered by two things, first is it necessary for df to reach the next stage of its development and second are the dev's personally interested in the subject matter, as has been shown if the dev's are interested in something right now then its going in regardless of where it fits on the dev roadmap and if there not interested then it'll only be done if its necessary for continued development.

Its just that the dev's aren't personally interested in feminine things and its not strictly necessary for the next step in df's development.

The game's approach to pregnancy, birth and the raising of children is akin to that; it all happens 'off screen' and we get presented with the finished 'product' in 12 years time.

You have to remember that DF is a project of personal gratification, if something does not interest them and is not strictly necessary for continued development then its not going in and this is not a bias against whats not going in but a choice to focus on whats personally interesting and what absolutely necessary for DF to reach the next step on its development roadmap.

Which is another way of saying exactly what I am saying; the bias exists and the bias is unconscious, being cultural in origin.

No its not because you keep missing my point which is there is a difference from your claim that the dev's have a bias against feminine things and my claim that they are merely apathetic to feminine things, apathy is not the same as bigotry even when they lead to the same outcome.

So I say again it not that the dev's are opposed to added feminine things (bias against) but that they focus on topic's that they they personally enjoy which just so happen to be masculine.

It is a bias that has existed at every stage of development, there is no reason to think the bias will ever be rectified over time simply by default simply because there may be some extra development eventually of those things.  Much of the things I am talking about would have been implemented already had the game not be so biased, there was never a need to wait until some distant future date in order to stop 100 year old human women from having babies. The bias is harming the game storymaking purpose since aside from the 100 year old mothers it is creating stories that are focused on mechanical violence and production with no focus whatsoever on the human side of things.  Those things evidently happen but everything about the game functions to distract us from that side of things, what matters is who you kill and what you make.

You claim there is this bias but I still disagree.

I think you have to watch DF's development more closely, the dev's are always working on either something that is necessary for the continued development or something that is personally interesting, you say that much of what you've mentions could have already been implemented and I agree it could have been added already and giant desert scorpions could have been reintroduced to the game even easier then anything you've suggested (he already has GDS raws) but guess what toady said when asked about GDS being reintroduced just last month?

Do you have any plans regarding when to fix giant desert scorpions and cannibalism? You've said before that giant desert scorpions will be reimplemented, but it's been a while.

I don't have a specific time in mind.

I think this highlights that the dev's work on whatever has their interest and if their apathetic about something its going to have to wait until its necessary to the continued development or whimsy helps them do it sooner and the things you've suggested however valid just haven't been interesting or necessary to them.

Now as for your claim that there is "no reason to think the bias will ever be rectified" the I disagree again, if you go though the DF talks and the development page you'll see that one of their long term goals is to enable the player's adventurer character to have children and then play "on" as your own child, this mean that your adventurer must either be able to be impregnated or impregnate another which is the perfect time to handle the implementation of the intricacies of pregnancy, childbirth, childcare ect. but until then its on the back burner because they want to do other stuff.

[GoblinCookie]

I disagree, my standpoint is that there is a difference between a bias towards something and a bias against something, even if the end result is the same the cause is different, Like I said DF is a personal project of self gratification and as such things that the devs enjoy or find entertaining get added and things the devs don't find entertaining don't and what gets added or not is a conscious decision on their part.

Take your midwife example, all that's need for the devs to consciously choose not to add it is is a simple "that doesn't interest me" and as we know the dev's will quite happily work on adding damn near anything that takes their interest regardless of if its next on the list of goals.

The devs tend to introduce things in blocks, with a whole raft of similar things together.  This is what gives the lie to the notion that they are neutral on feminine things then they would add those things when they appear but the masculine things would drive things forward.  The medical block turns up and they add in a whole raft of medical skills but even though midwifery is a medical skill it does go in. 

I personally don't find genderless society fascinating at all and would say that having all possible societies interacting with each other is much more fascinating and there are many other thing which marks the game out then something as boring (in my opinion) as a world full of genderless civs.

Each to his own.

Good thing their making a myth generator that can give us reasons for the societies gender role development and given DF's setting an answer like "The gods decreed that man would rule over woman" is just as valid as an answer of "The gods decreed that woman would rule over man" or "both man and woman would be considered equal in the eye's of the gods" and even in low fantasy setting that can be used as the answer as that was the reason given IRL with the true reasons being lost to time.

That is the RNG JesterHell696. 

Either you missed my point or I don't explain it well, for the sake of discussion lets say Trump = masculine things and Clinton = feminine things.

My point is that there is a difference between voting for Trump because you prefer his policies (my stance on the devs) and voting Trump because you simply don't want a female president, now I understand that some people will say there voting Trump because they prefer his policies while in actual fact they subconsciously don't want a female president (your stance on the devs) but that's not what I think is happening in DF's development.

My stance is that the imbalance weakens the game and thus needs to be rectified. 

I disagree, I know a few people whom still refuse to allow female dwarves in the military and whom always choose a male dwarf to become count of the fortress, and in IRL there are many women in the military but its still considered a masculine thing, I think where both seeing what we want to see.

Those are sexist players, they have no bearing on the game mechanics. 

No, where talking about DF's development and how you seem to think that the lack of feminine things is because the dev's are subconsciously bias against it while I think they have a conscious preference (bias) towards masculine thing and that I believe that while the end result is the same (a lack of feminine things) the cause is different.

You simply share their unconscious bias and hence approve of what they have not done. 

I think I have to explain my stance in more detail.

I think that humans are born with a default position of neutrality (apathetic) on all issues and that over the course of their life they develop likes (positive bias) and dislikes (negative bias) based upon the culture they grow up in and various life events.

Now as I understand it your stance is that the DF dev's have an unconscious dislike of feminine things (negative bias) and as a result of this dislike choose to focus on masculine things unconsciously.

But my stance is that the DF dev's are neutral (apathetic) about feminine things and have a like (positive bias) of masculine things and as such when choosing what to spend their time on they choose to spend it on things they do like rather then things their merely meh about and my entire point is that I think there is a difference between a negative bias (dislike) of something and being apathetic (neutral) about it.

Basically I think they looked at it and shrugged their shoulders and said "do it later" because they had other things they liked and that they did want to work on.

I have addressed the basic point already above about how the devs do stuff in blocks.

I disagree, saying I like combat and I want to disembowel my enemy's is conscious just like saying I don't care about midwives is a conscious, now I know your saying that the motivation behind these decisions is unconscious bias against feminine things but I disagree, I think its only a bias for the inclusion of masculine things with no bias against feminine and there is a difference.

To repeat my earlier point.  You start off with the masculine disemboweling of enemies, from there we head to the somewhat ambiguous field of medicine.  However even though it is your job at this point to develop medicine you fail to take into account the question of midwifes even though they are an important medical question in real life.  So instead of developing the game into potentially ambiguous or feminine fields you instead loop back to your original masculine starting point, refusing to develop any field of medicine however important except what is directly relevant to the original hacking things masculine starting point. 

Its also clear that DF's development choices are powered by two things, first is it necessary for df to reach the next stage of its development and second are the dev's personally interested in the subject matter, as has been shown if the dev's are interested in something right now then its going in regardless of where it fits on the dev roadmap and if there not interested then it'll only be done if its necessary for continued development.

Its just that the dev's aren't personally interested in feminine things and its not strictly necessary for the next step in df's development.

Our job in the suggestions forum is to broaden the devs minds JesterHell696 so that they do things that do not immediately occur to them, plus to critique the development of the game. 

You have to remember that DF is a project of personal gratification, if something does not interest them and is not strictly necessary for continued development then its not going in and this is not a bias against whats not going in but a choice to focus on whats personally interesting and what absolutely necessary for DF to reach the next step on its development roadmap.

We as the community have donated a fair bit too much money for it to be purely a project of personal gratification of two people any longer.

No its not because you keep missing my point which is there is a difference from your claim that the dev's have a bias against feminine things and my claim that they are merely apathetic to feminine things, apathy is not the same as bigotry even when they lead to the same outcome.

So I say again it not that the dev's are opposed to added feminine things (bias against) but that they focus on topic's that they they personally enjoy which just so happen to be masculine.

I was never accusing the devs of bigotry.  I am just pointing out that there is an unconscious bias which is weakening the game's development and I am trying to bring to their attention. 

You claim there is this bias but I still disagree.

I think you have to watch DF's development more closely, the dev's are always working on either something that is necessary for the continued development or something that is personally interesting, you say that much of what you've mentions could have already been implemented and I agree it could have been added already and giant desert scorpions could have been reintroduced to the game even easier then anything you've suggested (he already has GDS raws) but guess what toady said when asked about GDS being reintroduced just last month?

Yes what I mentioned, particularly the core menopause idea should already have been implemented.  That it has not has nothing to do with the desire or bigotry of the devs but is simply because of unconscious biases. 

I think this highlights that the dev's work on whatever has their interest and if their apathetic about something its going to have to wait until its necessary to the continued development or whimsy helps them do it sooner and the things you've suggested however valid just haven't been interesting or necessary to them.

Now as for your claim that there is "no reason to think the bias will ever be rectified" the I disagree again, if you go though the DF talks and the development page you'll see that one of their long term goals is to enable the player's adventurer character to have children and then play "on" as your own child, this mean that your adventurer must either be able to be impregnated or impregnate another which is the perfect time to handle the implementation of the intricacies of pregnancy, childbirth, childcare ect. but until then its on the back burner because they want to do other stuff.

If I have 1000 points of masculine development and 100 points of feminine development there is no less bias than if there were 10 points of masculine development then the bias has not been rectified even if there has been 10X times more development of the feminine things.  There are two things, namely realistic childbirth/midwifes and menopause that are both easy to implement and would go a long way to rectifying the imbalance, stuff like childcare is harder/more complex. 

[Bumber]

inb4 10 pages of argument that don't really go anywhere.