Is this offensive?

[S'mon]

I
Implementation would have to look like this to me: Dig up actual research on the mean difference between men & women (surely someone can pinpoint research that's been done like that in the real world). Convert that to ability score modifiers. If the difference is less than +/-2 (in 3E), scrap it as negligible.

That would eliminate everything except STR, mean female STR is about 3 points lower in D&D terms, going to about 4 points at the high end, eg combat soldiers or bodybuilders.

 

[S'mon]

Now THAT is a good analogy.

Not really, males are around 60% stronger in the upper body than females of the same mass on average IRL, which is more than the +2 bonus half-orcs get over humans, more like +3.

 

[S'mon]

That's a complete non-sequitur.

 

[JDJblatherings]

All the evidence is that women on average have superior personal interaction skills. I've been on police patrol and seen male and female officers dealing with suspects and seen this first hand, the women were much better at calming the suspects.

In the U.K., in the 21st century. Are there as many female officers in leadership as there are in the ranks (in the same ratio as men)? Is the force more then a couple percent women? Your personal observation simply shows that women that become police officers that you have observed are better at calming suspects. Mayhap women that become police officers have that skill set?

Let's look at the most uncharsimatic of traffic police, the meter maid: no high charisma there. By observation usually female, usually very unhappy and unpleasant, from that sampling women clearly have a charisma penalty without a doubt.

Unscientific observation can get very different results.

 

[JDJblatherings]

With a 3d6 a score of 18 is not such a statistical anomaly that 1 in 216 adventuring women wouldn't get a score of 18 in STR.

 

[S'mon]

In the U.K., in the 21st century. Are there as many female officers in leadership as there are in the ranks (in the same ratio as men)?

Fewer women are motivated to become leaders, and historically leaders had to be male, but there are plenty of highly charismatic female leaders in British history - Thatcher, Elizabeth I and Boadicea, to name three.

Women do have higher, quiter voices than men and can fade into the background in a noisy group. If Charisma is primarily about ability to forcefully impose your will on a group by talking loudly & commandingly, then I can see a case against a female CHA bonus; in which case female superiority in social interaction would give a WIS bonus.

Incidentally I think there are cultural reasons why in the USA women are often not taken seriously as leaders, and this differs from the UK and other countries (I think the US has stronger cultural gender differentiation than most Western countries). Not long ago in the USA African-Americans were often not regarded as capable of leadership either, but I think this has changed. It could change for women too, although I think the reasons are deep-seated and personally I don't think American feminism is helping women be taken seriously as leaders.

 

[hong]

In before the lock!

 

[S'mon]

Is the force more then a couple percent women?

Yeah, the Metropolitan Police is about 1/3 female I think. I work closely with our local Metropolitan Police Safer Neighbourhood Team; the Sergeant is female, and a highly effective leader with a commanding personality. About 50% of her officers are female.

 

[apoptosis]

I don't have the article handy, but I've read that size/strength differences between the sexes strongly correlates to a speices preference for bigamy/monogamy.

Speices that maintain multiple female partners per male (historacally speaking) lead to bigger and stronger males and relatively smaller and slighter females on average. As one poster noted earlier, this has a lot to do with competetion and selection. We can tell from the current physical size difference between men and women that humans have been mildly bigamous during our evolution.

Whereas speices that choose a single mating partner for life have very little or no relative difference between the sexes in size and strength.

I think it could be an interesting excerise to explore as a fantasy culture in a campaign. Much of this relates to culture in modern times. One of the reasons I love roleplaying is to sample these kind of different-from-the-norm ideas.

Trying to quantify nebulous things, such as "social intelligence" just seems like a can of worms to me.

I don't think all this worth statting out as system mechanical bonuses/pernalties though. I'd agree with the points that (a) the system is not granular enough and (b) the tools already exist for a player to stress those differences, or perhaps more importantly, break the stereotype if they wish.

Imposing arbitrary and perceived limits from the "real world" restricts players in a fashion I wouldn't be interested in doing. I don't find it offensive, just... mostly meaningless.

This theory is actually in debate currently in several articles in the Journal of Primatology. This was the original idea of the driving force of sexual dimorphism but a significant group of scholars believe that the driving force is overall size as the size of primates get larger it is highly correlated with sexual dimorpism in the species.

To me i like the mating theory better but time will tell as to which one is the greater driving force for this phenomena.

 

[apoptosis]

I think a more realistic comparison for men and women in D&D terms would be to make them climb a wall, jump a few hurdles, fight with a three pound training weapon, and haul sandbags. My prediction is that, for a group of physically active participants, men will meaningfully outperform women only in the sandbag event.

Rowing is a bad example for a number of reasons. First, it involves a very specific motion, not dynamic and varied actions. Str in D&D is very general. Second, yes, it involves only athletes. I don't know a lot about rowing, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess men are more commonly interested in rowing, giving them a huge advantage in the talent pool department. If there are three times as many male rowers as female, the top fifty percent of men are going to blow away the ten ten percent of women. Third, it's hard to translate rowing performance into D&D units. I don't know how much damage rowing causes or how many pounds it weighs. Telling me the energy output by itself is pretty meaningless, because Str in D&D does not measure energy output except in a very aggregate and general way. It's useful information, but certainly not the last word. Fourth, rowing is very demanding and places unusual demands on its participants; competitive rowers are going to have very different characteristics from average people, and that difference itself is going to be different than the differences between practitioners of one sport and another.

Finally, glancing at actual Olympic records, I see that the best times arevery close. I don't know what a double scull is, but I do know that 6.11.49 and 6.49.00 are close enough I question whether there's a difference AT ALL at the leve of detail D&D uses. A difference of just 8% or so, assuming rowing uses a similar progress to encumbrance, translates into a single point of Str.

Men would outperform women in every one of those tasks they are all based on physical strength and muscle mass. The armed forces does those type of tests and men always outperform the women.

It is just biology. Women will on average outlive men for the same reason, biology (now that the death due to childbirth has been significantly decreased). Men have made gains in this area but women still have a significantly greater average lifespan and probably always will.

8% difference could easily be the difference between an average college male athlete and an Olympic male athlete. You really cant use that type of argument. Look at every event where men and women compete in the same event and the records for men are always higher than for women.

The funny part about all of this is that strength is in many ways one of the least important attributes in modern society.