D&D 5E 5e's new gender policy - is it attracting new players?

[TheCosmicKid]

Aegis (the giantish language) has no gendered pronouns.

I should note that there isn't actually any correlation between the presence or absence of grammatical gender in a language and its culture's attitudes towards biological sex and cultural gender. (Not even when grammatical gender ostensibly maps to "male"/"female", which it doesn't always -- "animate"/"inanimate" is also a common distinction, and there are many others.) Most languages do not have grammatical gender, but most cultures are pretty darn sexist.

My elves, simply put, don't have gender roles. Men and women perform the same activities and wear the same clothes (appropriately tailored, of course). They don't pretend biological sex doesn't exist, but outside romance and reproduction they think it's as relevant as handedness or eye color. Their languages, however, still have a full-blown gender system with masculine and feminine names and pronouns. Admittedly, this is partially because I decided not to reinvent the wheel and just used Quenya and Sindarin, but I wouldn't have done that if I didn't know it was plausible. Just because the grammar makes a distinction doesn't mean the speakers, in the bigger picture, care. (Do you think the Old English cared more about the number two than we do because they had a dual as well as a plural?)

And there are infinite ways you can play with these linguistic concepts. My dwarves don't have masculine and feminine names; I've just got one big unisex master list. But they do have grammatical gender, which means that the same name declines differently for a man than for a woman. So people who don't know the dwarven language may make erroneous assumptions about their attitudes, seeing the same names and not realizing how they're distinguished. I even suggest that this fact contributes to the ignorant myth among humans that there are no dwarf women, or that they are "disguised" as men.

 

[Fedge123]

...
I was once in a discussion about wages, where someone was explaining that the only reason women get paid less than men is that they are worse negotiators. He went on to explain that he himself is a hiring manager, and that he generally offers childless women about 20-30% less than he would offer a man with the same skills, because he thinks they will likely quit to have kids. That's a pretty significant gap in treatment, coming from someone who insists that there is no gap in treatment.
...

Your hiring manager friend should be terminated immediately because behavior like that is illegal in the United States. Give me the name of the firm he works for so I can file a lawsuit and retire after I win the case.

 

[seebs]

I should note that there isn't actually any correlation between the presence or absence of grammatical gender in a language and its culture's attitudes towards biological sex and cultural gender. (Not even when grammatical gender ostensibly maps to "male"/"female", which it doesn't always -- "animate"/"inanimate" is also a common distinction, and there are many others.) Most languages do not have grammatical gender, but most cultures are pretty darn sexist.

That is a really good point. I think a lot of discussions of sexism in English are hugely influenced by the happenstance quirk that our language uses gender for pronouns. That said, I'd also point out that I think grammatical gender is a distinct question from gendered pronouns; for instance, German has most inanimate objects gendered as one of male, female, or neutral, while English generally doesn't, but both have male/female pronouns. (Trivia point: If your native language genders objects, you do actually pick up masculine/feminine associations for corresponding objects, even though they're obviously not semantically valid.)

Game relevance: This is the kind of thing that might make for a fascinating thing to deal with when dealing with language translation and magic in D&D games.

 

[seebs]

Your hiring manager friend should be terminated immediately because behavior like that is illegal in the United States. Give me the name of the firm he works for so I can file a lawsuit and retire after I win the case.

1. Wasn't in the US.
2. Don't know where he works, but I seem to recall he said a lot of other dumb stuff.
3. I don't think you can generally get a lot of money from a lawsuit against someone who does something illegal that has no effect on you personally whatsoever.

And yes, it is indeed illegal, but it turns out that people do lots of illegal things and it's very hard to prove any of it well enough to get them compelled to stop.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

Although once you're an archmage and can cast Shapechange whenever you want, it turns out that "gender" is sort of a momentary-whim thing anyway.

Or a deity. My trickster god (actually a nature spirit who infiltrated the pantheon) sees gender as a tool for screwing with people, in every sense of the word.

 

[Umbran]

And I note, this has a parallel in gaming groups. If there's a couple who join a gaming group, I have seen people refer to "Steve and his girlfriend", but never to "Jane and her boyfriend". The question is always whether the girl can actually play or is just tagging along with the boyfriend, never the other way around. And I've seen cases where the girl is the serious gamer and the boy is just tagging along... But no one suggests that as a possibility, because the cultural narrative is that girls aren't real gamers.

Well, there's a confounding bias there - who did the group know first or better?

When my wife and I join a group, and someone refers to the pair of us, they almost always mention *her* first, because she's the outgoing one, the person everyone else knows.

This reverses when we go to EN World gamedays, where I am the one who is known, and she's the relative unknown. That is, until her outgoing nature has its effect, and then it changes over to folks mentioning her first.

 

[seebs]

Or a deity. My trickster god (actually a nature spirit who infiltrated the pantheon) sees gender as a tool for screwing with people, in every sense of the word.

"Infiltrated the pantheon" is a lovely phrase and I will use it elsewhere.

This is the kind of thing which I think actually makes for some really interesting potential plot points, and creates a richer game. I would not enjoy the game as much without the ability to talk about things like that. I mean, it's certainly a thing with historical precedent in human mythologies.

 

[seebs]

Well, there's a confounding bias there - who did the group know first or better?

When my wife and I join a group, and someone refers to the pair of us, they almost always mention *her* first, because she's the outgoing one, the person everyone else knows.

This reverses when we go to EN World gamedays, where I am the one who is known, and she's the relative unknown. That is, until her outgoing nature has its effect, and then it changes over to folks mentioning her first.

That is a good point! When I was seeing this, the hobby was male-heavy enough that it could well just be the "who did they know first" thing. So it may not be a real example of gender bias directly. Hard to say.

 

[Uller]

Zero of the words you just said are actually true, because it doesn't take rampant misogyny or anything that would actually hold up in a discrimination case in court to make a space or field unwelcoming to women, or even to actively drive them out of it.

Whoops...didnt mean to like this comment. In fact meant to reply.

Every word in that post is true. I've been in sw dev for 20 years. The industry falls all over itself to make women feel welcome. From engineering departments in colleges to HR to engineering departments in private companies. These lies about my industry are getting old and I won't tolerate them. In fact, the very idea that women are so fragile that they would feel unwelcome because of imagined sexism is sexist. My daughter is a 14 yo ice hockey player. She plays on boys teams. There are very few girls...she doesn't sit around whining about feeling unwelcome because she's tough and strong and loves playing hockey. If a woman wants to be an engineer there is literally nothing stoping her except herself.

When I was 15 years old I was told by the dean of engineering at a major university that as a white male I had no chance at being accepted into her program unless I had straight As. That is discrimination. That is privileging people because of race and sex and it is extremely common even to this day.

In the 20 years I've been workng I've worked for and with women. Some excellent engineers, some not. I've hired women. There is no heman-woman-haters club. Or if there is they are a remarkably secretive bunch.

This whole "white male privilege" nonsense is just a way of turning innocent people who plod through life doing the best they can into villains by making broad assertions based on sexism and racism.

You said it earlier in the thread and you should heed your own advice: give every individual the benefit of the doubt. If there are fewer women and tech it may simply be that many women choose other fields for their own individual reasons. So what if they do?

 

[billd91]

Your hiring manager friend should be terminated immediately because behavior like that is illegal in the United States. Give me the name of the firm he works for so I can file a lawsuit and retire after I win the case.

You can't. You'd need to be party to the harm inflicted by those hiring practices.