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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cerebral Paladin" data-source="post: 5419209" data-attributes="member: 3448">I roughly agree with Wik's assessment as to why, although with I think different normative values.  From my perspective, avoiding the stock characters of the helpless female character and the good scientist who is always male and so forth is a good thing.  Many of my players have complained about seeing those patterns in other people's games, and I've found it annoying in games that I've played in.  It's desirable to avoid the sexism inherent in many GMs' presentations of their worlds.  But it's only half-way there:  the real goal is to avoid simply reversing things into a new set of stereotypes.  And that requires either being really careful and skilled at not falling into patterns, or using random mechanisms.So as I see it, the hierarchy from worst to best practices is:1.  Consistent gender normativity in a game:  all scientists and guards are male, all people in distress are female, etc.2.  Exceptional individuals exist, but otherwise gender normativity:  some carefully detailed scientist or knight characters are female, but a random cop on the spur of the moment is always male.  (This is what I think of as the Battlestar Galactica approach:  sure, there are the named character female characters in nontraditional roles, but boy, the extras sure do seem to conform to traditional roles--so you get the female Starbuck leading a platoon of all male Marines.)3.  Reversed and idiosyncratic stereotyping--all the female scientists are good guys, the female knights are always good and competent, etc.  In some ways, this is the pattern with the particularly high number of black lieutenants in police shows--it's the token minority in a position of authority.4.  Actually getting past the stereotyping in either direction, i.e. through random means.All that said, I don't really know why in your case it shows up in scientist characters in particular. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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