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[Granite26]

heirs or hares?

but yeah, I'm in favor of defining jobs by caste (Only the warrior ants become warriors if you want real world justification)

Also, it may not be worth it but breeding castes with other than 2 sexes would be cool.  Asexual obviously.  There's nothing but sci-fi suggesting more, but hey..

[Sutremaine]

Do you really think it would be sexist to say that guys are generally stronger than gals?

For human men and women who exist in the real world, no. For fantasy human men and women, it depends what kind of world the author is trying to model and how well they pull it off. For dwarves, it would depend how much of the game beyond the tech level is intended to stick to human medieval European norms.

[mickel]

It would be fun to introduce a completely random sexual dimorphism. Maybe dwarf males all have dark hair, and dwarf females all have blond hair? Or the other way round? That way you would go by the color of the beard, and hair dye would be all-important to crossdressers.

[LegoLord]

I mean some people complain that Women in this game who are soldiers bring a battalion of children with them... You know who else does that? BATMAN!!!

Wait, Batman's a woman 

Anyway, all I have to contribute to this argument are these two things:
1) Dwarves that ignore gender for day-to-day life are awesome cause it makes them more culturally diverse from humans.  Therefore dwarves in DF should do so.  If dwarves are, in the physical sense, just small humans, then there is no reason to play as them, as opposed to playing as humans.
2) Female spiders are far more vicious than male spiders.  Whether the male or female of a species is stronger than the opposite sex should be determined by something in the raws.

[G-Flex]

Do you really think it would be sexist to say that guys are generally stronger than gals?

No, just that you have to actually treat it as realistically as possible in order to avoid a sexist implementation of it. With a lot of in-game systems, you can fudge things a bit and nobody cares, but you might run into weird implications if you end up with a system where, say, a woman can never be as strong as any man of identical training, or whatever (e.g. all men are more "naturally strong" than all women). For instance, you CAN'T just say "men need fewer experience points than women to increase strength" unless you take individual differences into account such that some women require less experience than some men for it.

[bjlong]

^^^It would be great if body types were taken into account in determining stats. Then you could just define a range of body types per gender, and let that take care of the stat differences.

[Navian]

Many of the differences between males and females in humans are due to gender roles, not sexual dimorphism. This has been breaking down in many cultures over the last century, and there are many women who are more physically impressive than most men could ever dream of being.

The main pitfall lies in assuming that both sexes have the same bell curve, so that you can compare statistics just by looking at the best (and most visible) members of a group. This doesn't work, because males, only having one X chromosome, have a shallowing bell curve, making the analysis very complicated. There's little point in representing this in a fantasy game, because it's merely a quirk of genetics.

I should also point out that he main reason men go to war and women don't isn't capability, it's expendability. Women tend to have fewer 'hunter' adaptations, such male facial structure and the ability to easily gain muscle mass. The verdict of the past few million years of evolution is that the females of our species are too valuable to go beast-hunting and raiding under uncertain conditions. If they weren't, they'd be better at it by now. If they couldn't, they'd be worse at it by now.

Women tend to have many adaptations that are actually pretty important to staying alive and in control in dangerous situations of extended length and high complexity, ones that men tend to lack due to a focus on raw mass and singlemindedness. It's a matter of style, it's physically impossible for one gender to be 'better' than another in such an advanced species, it would be too inefficient to not have both maximized--human brainpower costs a lot of energy, it's a shame to waste it on the arbitrary assignment of a submissive role, and the universe figured this out on its own before the dawn of history, even if not all people understand it yet.

I think the current gender neutrality of the game is great, and any changes to it should be modest and reserved. It's very, very easy to go wrong with it. A simple system that ensured that there were more men deviating from the norm (for good or for ill) than women would be interesting and model reality just fine for any humanoid race, but there'd be little point except to ensure that female leaders and criminals would be something special. I'm not even sure that'd be a good thing.

[Neonivek]

We should probably be careful and not degenerate into a "Male vs. Female" battle especially since many steriotypes we apply to males and females are often untrue, reversed, or taught. If we open this up to the Animal kingdom then all bets are off.

[Sergius]

It makes sense than in a species, male and female can be different, and one even inferio stat-wise than the other (on average at least).

It also makes sense to let players choose their gender and not have an unbalanced character when choosing male vs female, so most people just do away with gender difference (in the case of player characters).

Note that games like D&D claim that "females are just as able as males", they never mean the barmaid or the local blacksmith. (unless it's a female blacksmith, in which case she's big and oafy)

[Neonivek]

Well the issue is that in a Dramatic world having Women weaker then males even when they both go through the same training as a whole goes against such a system.

Remember as much of a reflection of real life Dwarf Fortress is... it is a world where people can become superhuman by beating up wolves.

[Sergius]

You get superstrong by signing off a lot of production orders and counting stock and becoming a legendary liar.

[Neonivek]

You get superstrong by signing off a lot of production orders and counting stock and becoming a legendary liar.

I should probably elaborate that I don't mean the system is silly and thus real life makes no sense.

I mean... that the setting is supposed to express a sort of mythological environment where being a woman or man is no more an advantage as it is a disadvantage.

[Faces of Mu]

Do you really think it would be sexist to say that guys are generally stronger than gals?

...For instance, you CAN'T just say "men need fewer experience points than women to increase strength" unless you take individual differences into account such that some women require less experience than some men for it.

I'm glad someone finally brought individual differences into the debate. I've always been warned to be careful in interpreting averages as they may have no practical relevance whatsoever. My stats lecturers often said "There can often be more variability within a group than between two groups".

I like the gender equality in DF, and I think when Toady establishes more moddable data then there should be options available in the raws for traditionalists and budding sociologists alike.

[Granite26]

1) Dwarves that ignore gender for day-to-day life are awesome cause it makes them more culturally diverse from humans.  Therefore dwarves in DF should do so.  If dwarves are, in the physical sense, just small humans, then there is no reason to play as them, as opposed to playing as humans.
2) Female spiders are far more vicious than male spiders.  Whether the male or female of a species is stronger than the opposite sex should be determined by something in the raws.

1: Humans are in the game too, though.  (Honestly, I don't really care about making human females weaker, I'm just upset that people think that saying 'the fact the human females are generally weaker should be in the game' is sexist, or that modelling the vast majority of human societies with gender roles somehow perpetuates some great travesty)

2: Tell me about it.  In most species, the female is bigger, stronger, meaner, and more deadly.  I think it's just Primates and a few other social mammals that this trend got reversed

I'm glad someone finally brought individual differences into the debate. I've always been warned to be careful in interpreting averages as they may have no practical relevance whatsoever. My stats lecturers often said "There can often be more variability within a group than between two groups".

I like the gender equality in DF, and I think when Toady establishes more moddable data then there should be options available in the raws for traditionalists and budding sociologists alike.

If the model reflects individual variants in potential, yes.  But what is traditionalist about saying 'This is true in general'?  (Prejudiced is saying 'your category and thus you'... it isn't saying 'your category' in the first place)

[Chthonic]

Many of the differences between males and females in humans are due to gender roles, not sexual dimorphism . . . Women tend to have fewer 'hunter' adaptations, such male facial structure and the ability to easily gain muscle mass. The verdict of the past few million years of evolution is that the females of our species are too valuable to go beast-hunting and raiding under uncertain conditions . . .

I'm not saying you're contradicting yourself, but you aren't convincingly supporting your thesis . . . any time you're pushing the 'nurture' side of the debate, you have to stay far, far away from evolution.

Far, far away . . .