At least according to older lore, Astra Militarum tends to sort men and women into separate regiments. It makes sense because men and women had several specific different needs and it was easier to resupply them if each regiment exclusively consisted of one or the other gender.
However, the mono-sex regiments are very boring, so this idea rarely ever gets translated to books.
Still, the majority of Astra Militarum regiments are comprised of mainly male soldiers. But since there is no reason why females are not recruited, such as the Voystrian Firstborn having an arbitrary system where all the first children of every family join the Astra Militarum, and women should still make up at least half of the humans of the Imperium of Man, then why are there no regiments are women are the majority? Even female writers still put a few women in regiments full of men.
Is there any particular reason why we don't see female-majority regiments in books more often? Or women in combat roles in fiction in general, despite the setting clearly encouraging all genders to take up arms?
bibotot wrote: ... then why are there no regiments are women are the majority?
It's a big universe. There probably "are," and your own homebrew regiment certainly can be.
Is there any particular reason why we don't see female-majority regiments in books more often? Or women in combat roles in fiction in general, despite the setting clearly encouraging all genders to take up arms?
Well you see, there are these things called sexism and patriarchy that have impacted both real-world culture and the fictional works they produce. In this essay I will...
EDIT: In the context of 40k specifically, the existence of the sororitas is probably a factor. If you're going to write about an all-female human faction, there happens to already be a canon one that went a long time without a lot of BL novels. So if you're working up a pitch in your head for your next BL novel and you get as far as, "all-woman regiment," I think you at least have to pause to consider whether this should be a sisters' story instead of a guard story.
There's maybe also a little hesitation caused by the knowledge that putting women front and center in a story (especially in a faction that is usually not exclusively female) is inevitably going to cause at least a little whining from the more misogynistic members of our hobby. Imagine, if you will, the kind of unpleasant reactions you'd see if Disney announced the next Star Wars miniseries was going to be set in the Old Republic, but the jedi cast would be exclusively women.
In general, if a BL novel or short story were to feature an exclusively female regiment, I think most of us would just go, "Oh cool," and file it away as a memorable subfaction quirk.
40Ks background and novels are mostly to support the miniatures.
Up until recently female guard miniatures were rare.
I'm not sure but since the Cadian update you could make a whole female army, right? I'd say that makes a book about female regiments more likely.
It’s mixed now, but Cain’s main regiment was formed from the merger of an all female regiment with an all male one (which caused much of the conflict of the first book) and the series mentions other all female regiments.
bibotot wrote: ... then why are there no regiments are women are the majority?
It's a big universe. There probably "are," and your own homebrew regiment certainly can be.
Is there any particular reason why we don't see female-majority regiments in books more often? Or women in combat roles in fiction in general, despite the setting clearly encouraging all genders to take up arms?
Well you see, there are these things called sexism and patriarchy that have impacted both real-world culture and the fictional works they produce. In this essay I will...
I disagree, while sexism and misogyny exist, GW has always been inclusive and welcoming to everyone (like it should be). They have even made multiple public statements about this. I’m only talking about GW brands. I’m sure you can easily find a company that publishes horrible books about xy and z.
There is likely a less sinister reason to why you do not see it often, mainly being the vast majority of hobbyists being male and authors want their readers getting immersed in their novels. Other reasons could range from there are already all female factions with plenty of books to choose from (Broken Saints was rly good IMO). To understanding that at the end of the day GW is a company whose main goal is to make money, maybe they have concluded it wouldn’t sell and make much profits. We already see them heavily favoring space marines because that’s their money making baby.
But even as I stated earlier, there are a lot of books that have female protagonists or have major characters female. Anything by Dan Abenett usually has a good ratio of male to female characters. I have personally read Crossfire. Master of Mankind, Carrion Throne, Path of the Seer, Faith and Fire, and Betrayer which are great novels.
Finally, at the end of the day though, the cool thing about the universe is you can make up a regiment yourself and make up your own lore. The universe is made to do pretty much whatever you want and it be lore wise (I said pretty much, calm down there killers lol). Just have fun, and if you get hate who cares continue doing you, the vast majority of hobbyists are welcoming and loving.
Until very recently, all BL authors have been men, many of them self-taught as authors. And watching a man try and write a story involving an all female cast interacting with each other feels like a train crash waiting to happen akin to a worse version of C.S. Goto. You don't see 40k works passing the Bechdel test very often for a reason. Writing from the perspective of an ork is much less likely to be bad, and if it is, to then give offence. The best we've managed to get is the very occasional side character like Lotara Sarrin who doesn't entirely come across as a plot device for the men (looking at you. Bequin and Amberley Vail).
Gaunts Ghosts are also a mixed regiment in the later books at least.
For the next passage a general disclaimer: please don't understand this as any claim that women "only have one task: bear children" or the like. This only refers to a setting that is really grimdark and includes a regime that forces its planets to send millions of its population into war without a real chance of ever returning. A setting in which the grim calculus of attrition and population numbers forces harsh decisions...
I don't know if that was ever a consideration for the writers, but when I started to figure out fluff for my own homebrew regiment I stumbled on the point that under the assumption that the tithes are regular enough and big enough to really put a dent into a planets population AND given that its culture is not strictly monogamic, a population can bounce back far easier from the loss of a million men then from a million women.
Stupid example: lets say Planet Whocares V has a population of 10 Million, half men half women, with 2 million women in reproductive age and a not monogamic culture. It gets tithed, 1 Million men are send of world. Thats a huge dent in the population, yet the birth rate is almost not affected as all women that could bear children are still there and have the possibility to get pregnant if they want. Would they have tithed 1 million of the younger women, the birth rate would have been cut in half, until the younger generations come of age. If that is a warzone and the Imperium tithes the planets to the brink of breaking that really does matter a lot.
Now of course this is easy to write around when you come to fluff. One can always state that
1. for some unknown reason the sex-ratio on Whocares V is 2:1 in favor of females, so they are the natural choice for the imperial guard
2. Medicine in the Imperium allows for a far greater span of reproductive age that does not overlap that much with the tithing age for soldiers
3. The Society of Whocares V is matriarchaic and it seems absurd to them to send men into battle
4. Medicine is good enough, that the planet can tithe women that already got their children.
5. Womb Vitae or similar techniques are employed that decouple the birth rate from the size of female population.
Lord Damocles wrote: The Xenonians from the 3rd ed. Imperial Guard codex and Famous Regiments series in White Dwarf were all female (converted Escher gangers).
Presumably Necromunda raises all female regiments from House Escher, since other houses seem to contribute regiments.
This was my first thought too
Xenonian Free Companies (also spelt Zenonian) fought in both the 3rd War for Armageddon and the 13th Black Crusade.
There is a single official model of one (i.e. not a converted Escher) in the 3rd ed Schaeffer's Last Chancers set- Warrior Women is a Xenonian:
Honestly the most likely reason is already noted- GW doesn't make an all female option for the Imperial Guard model line. Therefore there's no pressure to create all female armies as a major book feature by the BL.
BL follows the models, even to the point where you realise that a lot of things within BL are very badly described or not described at all. This way if the model changes a bit (or a lot) the books kind of (or entirely) still work.
If GW created an Imperial Guard unit that could duel build male and female models then chances are we'd see at least one or two books, or a series if it worked; focused around notable female dominated/entire armies.
I'm very sure that the wealth of the setting will have "Amazon" style Imperial Guard armies comprised entirely, or mostly, of women. Heck chances are you would likely find a few in the archives of short stories or backgrounds of some bigger earlier books and such.
Overread wrote: Honestly the most likely reason is already noted- GW doesn't make an all female option for the Imperial Guard model line. Therefore there's no pressure to create all female armies as a major book feature by the BL.
BL follows the models, even to the point where you realise that a lot of things within BL are very badly described or not described at all. This way if the model changes a bit (or a lot) the books kind of (or entirely) still work.
If GW created an Imperial Guard unit that could duel build male and female models then chances are we'd see at least one or two books, or a series if it worked; focused around notable female dominated/entire armies.
I'm very sure that the wealth of the setting will have "Amazon" style Imperial Guard armies comprised entirely, or mostly, of women. Heck chances are you would likely find a few in the archives of short stories or backgrounds of some bigger earlier books and such.
I agree. I think it is notable that the only known lore example (to my knowledge) of an all-female regiment explicitly has aesthetics based off the existing Escher ganger models (see Xenonians above). So it is relatively easy to build an army of them.
bibotot wrote: At least according to older lore, Astra Militarum tends to sort men and women into separate regiments. It makes sense because men and women had several specific different needs and it was easier to resupply them if each regiment exclusively consisted of one or the other gender.
However, the mono-sex regiments are very boring, so this idea rarely ever gets translated to books.
Still, the majority of Astra Militarum regiments are comprised of mainly male soldiers. But since there is no reason why females are not recruited, such as the Voystrian Firstborn having an arbitrary system where all the first children of every family join the Astra Militarum, and women should still make up at least half of the humans of the Imperium of Man, then why are there no regiments are women are the majority? Even female writers still put a few women in regiments full of men.
Is there any particular reason why we don't see female-majority regiments in books more often? Or women in combat roles in fiction in general, despite the setting clearly encouraging all genders to take up arms?
Well, let's agree to disagree. I believe all men / all women regiments to be more interesting as they have their own specificities that don't exist anymore (at least where I live) due to most of the regiments being mixed. Only the foreign legion is still all men, and they have their own interesting culture.
An all women regiment would be different and totally interesting too !
But I think that even in the brutal world of 40k, in which every person is needed, women may still be frowned upon in combat roles, like in the real world, and for the exact same reasons. Maybe even more seeing as the world of 40k is even more harsh !
So there would be female snipers, nurses, technicians, pilots etc but less fighters. And 40k usually, in its books or games, focus more on combats and wars ...
But otherwise I think it's just because of the authors, as said before. Until very recently, BL wasn't very inclusive at all, because it was a white British male oriented company for white british male customers. No problem in that btw, but nowadays they are getting more open so we'll see some female warriors / soldiers, maybe
It’s a big galaxy. Each Tithed world will have its own Regimental Traditions.
We know from the Cain novels that Valhalla raises single-sex regiments. And from Cain’s own commentary, that’s because single sex = no babies being born within the regiment.
Yet, it’s also clearly not a hard and fast rule, as the Regiment Cain is attached to for a chunk of his career is mixed sex, as it’s an amalgam of two regiments which had been mauled fighting off a Tyranid invasion.
As the series progresses, not a huge amount is made of the regiment being mixed sex.
But what’s true for Valhalla by no means binds any other Regiment or Tithed World. Some will only send men, some might only send women. Some will send mixed sex recruits, some single sex Regiments.
And don’t underestimate the pressure of your Tithe. If you need to provide X recruits, you provide X recruits. Depending entirely upon how your populace is doing numbers wise, even the longest tradition can be ignored if it’s how you meet that Tithe. All the time you’re meeting your Tithe? Nobody really cares all that much what else you’re doing.
But very bad things happen if you don’t meet your Tithe. And somehow “well we did have the spare bods, but too many had the wrong sort of Rude Bits” is not going to wash.
bibotot wrote: At least according to older lore, Astra Militarum tends to sort men and women into separate regiments. It makes sense because men and women had several specific different needs and it was easier to resupply them if each regiment exclusively consisted of one or the other gender.
However, the mono-sex regiments are very boring, so this idea rarely ever gets translated to books.
Still, the majority of Astra Militarum regiments are comprised of mainly male soldiers. But since there is no reason why females are not recruited, such as the Voystrian Firstborn having an arbitrary system where all the first children of every family join the Astra Militarum, and women should still make up at least half of the humans of the Imperium of Man, then why are there no regiments are women are the majority? Even female writers still put a few women in regiments full of men.
Is there any particular reason why we don't see female-majority regiments in books more often? Or women in combat roles in fiction in general, despite the setting clearly encouraging all genders to take up arms?
In-universe: Because men simply make more sense in combat roles.
Men are on average stronger than women. Muscle mass matters. What is more, efficiency matters - if you take a man and a woman of similar mass, man will have more upper body strength and in fact more (even if not much) strength in general. And since caloric consumption depends in large part on body weight, yeah...
As for why no mixed units... you do know what happens when young healthy men get mixed with young healthy women, right? Now think about why that might be bad for combat effectiveness and morale...
bibotot wrote: At least according to older lore, Astra Militarum tends to sort men and women into separate regiments. It makes sense because men and women had several specific different needs and it was easier to resupply them if each regiment exclusively consisted of one or the other gender.
However, the mono-sex regiments are very boring, so this idea rarely ever gets translated to books.
Still, the majority of Astra Militarum regiments are comprised of mainly male soldiers. But since there is no reason why females are not recruited, such as the Voystrian Firstborn having an arbitrary system where all the first children of every family join the Astra Militarum, and women should still make up at least half of the humans of the Imperium of Man, then why are there no regiments are women are the majority? Even female writers still put a few women in regiments full of men.
Is there any particular reason why we don't see female-majority regiments in books more often? Or women in combat roles in fiction in general, despite the setting clearly encouraging all genders to take up arms?
In-universe: Because men simply make more sense in combat roles.
Men are on average stronger than women. Muscle mass matters. What is more, efficiency matters - if you take a man and a woman of similar mass, man will have more upper body strength and in fact more (even if not much) strength in general. And since caloric consumption depends in large part on body weight, yeah...
As for why no mixed units... you do know what happens when young healthy men get mixed with young healthy women, right? Now think about why that might be bad for combat effectiveness and morale...
Out-of-universe: Because it largely copied the real world, and majority of soldiers in real world are men, for the above reasons.
Broadly speaking, those in-universe arguments don't really apply to the 41st millennium. Or rather, they do apply and don't apply at the same time, on a case-by-case basis.
Firstly, the physical differences between men and women on modern day Earth don't apply consistently to the Imperium, where the variance between entire worlds is likely to be greater than that between sexes today. For example, Catachans are treated as equivalent to malnourished underhivers by the Departmento Munitorum, but these are almost certainly not going to be anything like equivalent in individual physical condition. Catachans are noted as being so strong that they are bordering abhuman, your typicall underhiver is going to be undersized and generally below average health for humanity. In addition, the Imperium's population is on the other side of widespread genemodding in the Dark Age of Technology and will have great variance between worlds as a result. Base humanity is thought to maybe not even exist by the time of the Unification of Terra.
Essentially, at the scale the Departmento Munitorum operates at, they abstract unit strength out to a level that sexual dimorphism is irrelevant.
Cultures also vary massively- some will have issues with mixed units, other canonically have mixed units without much problem. Cadians are the most well known- every citizen of Cadia is a conscript, all have military service, and the regiments are mixed gender (although this lore translates poorly into the models or even Black Library until recently). Cadian regiments are not plagued by "morale" issues as a result. As mentioned, Valhallan units are typically segregated, suggesting that their planetary culture is more problematic for mixing units. This will vary hugely depending on the culture of the planet and the Imperium contains myriad cultures within it. Merged regiments obviously can end up mixed, but these are always formations created out of necessity rather than choice.
I do think it is likely that a greater proportion of female combatants serve in planetary defence forces for various reasons mentioned in this thread. Doubly so if said PDF is a militia or national service formation.
bibotot wrote: At least according to older lore, Astra Militarum tends to sort men and women into separate regiments. It makes sense because men and women had several specific different needs and it was easier to resupply them if each regiment exclusively consisted of one or the other gender.
However, the mono-sex regiments are very boring, so this idea rarely ever gets translated to books.
Still, the majority of Astra Militarum regiments are comprised of mainly male soldiers. But since there is no reason why females are not recruited, such as the Voystrian Firstborn having an arbitrary system where all the first children of every family join the Astra Militarum, and women should still make up at least half of the humans of the Imperium of Man, then why are there no regiments are women are the majority? Even female writers still put a few women in regiments full of men.
Is there any particular reason why we don't see female-majority regiments in books more often? Or women in combat roles in fiction in general, despite the setting clearly encouraging all genders to take up arms?
In-universe: Because men simply make more sense in combat roles.
Men are on average stronger than women. Muscle mass matters. What is more, efficiency matters - if you take a man and a woman of similar mass, man will have more upper body strength and in fact more (even if not much) strength in general. And since caloric consumption depends in large part on body weight, yeah...
As for why no mixed units... you do know what happens when young healthy men get mixed with young healthy women, right? Now think about why that might be bad for combat effectiveness and morale...
Out-of-universe: Because it largely copied the real world, and majority of soldiers in real world are men, for the above reasons.
I don’t think your in-universe reasoning holds much water in a galaxy where humans have evolved into Ogryns, Ratlings, Psykers and Beastmen. If a human can turn into an Ogryn a planet with the average woman having the muscle mass (or more) of an average man is not really a farfetched idea.
Even in the real world gender roles and designations mostly are based on culture, not on biology.
One reason we might see women appear more in stories in command or planetary defence or navy roles could also just be that because GW doesn't have to make models for them, but they are part of the world; its much easier for authors to put women into those roles because there's just a bit more creative freedom as they aren't bound by model kits.
That said Haighus answers really well on the concept of social structures in the Imperium. Whilst there are some rough underlaying morals and structures that are found on most worlds; the sheer quantity and variety means that you'll likely find everything somewhere.
From worlds where women are near slave-cast to worlds where they are the ruling cast. Similarly worlds that will produce all women regiments to worlds that only produce all male. and every possible combination between the extremes
In general the Imperium at large doesn't care if you're male or female. It's also pretty open to if you identify as something else so long as you aren't a Xeno or Chaos created mutation (even though they hate the mutant, beneficial mutants like Rattlings and Ogyns are allowed).
In the end so long as you can pull the trigger on a lasgun you can, and will serve the Emperor.
bibotot wrote: At least according to older lore, Astra Militarum tends to sort men and women into separate regiments. It makes sense because men and women had several specific different needs and it was easier to resupply them if each regiment exclusively consisted of one or the other gender.
However, the mono-sex regiments are very boring, so this idea rarely ever gets translated to books.
Still, the majority of Astra Militarum regiments are comprised of mainly male soldiers. But since there is no reason why females are not recruited, such as the Voystrian Firstborn having an arbitrary system where all the first children of every family join the Astra Militarum, and women should still make up at least half of the humans of the Imperium of Man, then why are there no regiments are women are the majority? Even female writers still put a few women in regiments full of men.
Is there any particular reason why we don't see female-majority regiments in books more often? Or women in combat roles in fiction in general, despite the setting clearly encouraging all genders to take up arms?
In-universe: Because men simply make more sense in combat roles.
Men are on average stronger than women. Muscle mass matters. What is more, efficiency matters - if you take a man and a woman of similar mass, man will have more upper body strength and in fact more (even if not much) strength in general. And since caloric consumption depends in large part on body weight, yeah...
As for why no mixed units... you do know what happens when young healthy men get mixed with young healthy women, right? Now think about why that might be bad for combat effectiveness and morale...
Out-of-universe: Because it largely copied the real world, and majority of soldiers in real world are men, for the above reasons.
Broadly speaking, those in-universe arguments don't really apply to the 41st millennium. Or rather, they do apply and don't apply at the same time, on a case-by-case basis.
Firstly, the physical differences between men and women on modern day Earth don't apply consistently to the Imperium, where the variance between entire worlds is likely to be greater than that between sexes today. For example, Catachans are treated as equivalent to malnourished underhivers by the Departmento Munitorum, but these are almost certainly not going to be anything like equivalent in individual physical condition. Catachans are noted as being so strong that they are bordering abhuman, your typicall underhiver is going to be undersized and generally below average health for humanity. In addition, the Imperium's population is on the other side of widespread genemodding in the Dark Age of Technology and will have great variance between worlds as a result. Base humanity is thought to maybe not even exist by the time of the Unification of Terra.
Essentially, at the scale the Departmento Munitorum operates at, they abstract unit strength out to a level that sexual dimorphism is irrelevant.
Cultures also vary massively- some will have issues with mixed units, other canonically have mixed units without much problem. Cadians are the most well known- every citizen of Cadia is a conscript, all have military service, and the regiments are mixed gender (although this lore translates poorly into the models or even Black Library until recently). Cadian regiments are not plagued by "morale" issues as a result. As mentioned, Valhallan units are typically segregated, suggesting that their planetary culture is more problematic for mixing units. This will vary hugely depending on the culture of the planet and the Imperium contains myriad cultures within it. Merged regiments obviously can end up mixed, but these are always formations created out of necessity rather than choice.
I do think it is likely that a greater proportion of female combatants serve in planetary defence forces for various reasons mentioned in this thread. Doubly so if said PDF is a militia or national service formation.
bibotot wrote: At least according to older lore, Astra Militarum tends to sort men and women into separate regiments. It makes sense because men and women had several specific different needs and it was easier to resupply them if each regiment exclusively consisted of one or the other gender.
However, the mono-sex regiments are very boring, so this idea rarely ever gets translated to books.
Still, the majority of Astra Militarum regiments are comprised of mainly male soldiers. But since there is no reason why females are not recruited, such as the Voystrian Firstborn having an arbitrary system where all the first children of every family join the Astra Militarum, and women should still make up at least half of the humans of the Imperium of Man, then why are there no regiments are women are the majority? Even female writers still put a few women in regiments full of men.
Is there any particular reason why we don't see female-majority regiments in books more often? Or women in combat roles in fiction in general, despite the setting clearly encouraging all genders to take up arms?
In-universe: Because men simply make more sense in combat roles.
Men are on average stronger than women. Muscle mass matters. What is more, efficiency matters - if you take a man and a woman of similar mass, man will have more upper body strength and in fact more (even if not much) strength in general. And since caloric consumption depends in large part on body weight, yeah...
As for why no mixed units... you do know what happens when young healthy men get mixed with young healthy women, right? Now think about why that might be bad for combat effectiveness and morale...
Out-of-universe: Because it largely copied the real world, and majority of soldiers in real world are men, for the above reasons.
I don’t think your in-universe reasoning holds much water in a galaxy where humans have evolved into Ogryns, Ratlings, Psykers and Beastmen. If a human can turn into an Ogryn a planet with the average woman having the muscle mass (or more) of an average man is not really a farfetched idea.
Even in the real world gender roles and designations mostly are based on culture, not on biology.
Those cultural differences however are based on biology in the real world.
As for in-universe, even if a Catachan woman is stronger than average man, she will still be weaker than Catachan man. So it still makes sense to have men dominate the military, as any Catachan units will be raised based on Catachan standards.
Combat Drugs, Stims, Muscle Grafts, Bionics. All exist, all used in differing amounts across different Imperial Guard regiments. Not so much in modern military.
The upper body strength is also a daft argument here. Can they stand, carry and aim a Lasgun? Then they’re plenty good as Imperial Grade Cannon Fodder. Especially given Lasguns and their ammo packs are explicitly described as being lightweight, so this insistence on upper body strength just doesn’t apply to 40K as it does in the real world.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Combat Drugs, Stims, Muscle Grafts, Bionics. All exist, all used in differing amounts across different Imperial Guard regiments. Not so much in modern military.
The upper body strength is also a daft argument here. Can they stand, carry and aim a Lasgun? Then they’re plenty good as Imperial Grade Cannon Fodder. Especially given Lasguns and their ammo packs are explicitly described as being lightweight, so this insistence on upper body strength just doesn’t apply to 40K as it does in the real world.
Also, increased muscle mass = increased calorie requirements to maintain that muscle mass. There's a reason that no military in the modern world is trying to staff their combat forces exclusively with people with the physique of a Mr. Olympia.
The Imperium already has the space marine beefcakes to waste resources maintaining inefficient physiques on, they don't need to import that kind of thinking to the guard as well.
Ah, but the Space Marine physiology is canonically really efficient. Yes, they need far greater calorific intake than us Mere Smelly Hoomans - but they produce much less waste. So yes they need say, quadruple the Calories, but may only need twice the food mass, because their super guts can breakdown and extract calories with far greater efficiency.
Please note the “may”. I’m not stating that is the exact ratios. Used for demonstration purposes only.
As for in-universe, even if a Catachan woman is stronger than average man, she will still be weaker than Catachan man. So it still makes sense to have men dominate the military, as any Catachan units will be raised based on Catachan standards.
I still love the Adeptus Ridiculous joke (okay, heard it there first- may not have originated there):
The difference between getting pounced on by a Lictor vs. a female Catachan is your hardon serves a purpose.
Anyhoo, I think the overarching story here is that of a catch-22: putting female guards in would empower women, show badass ladies who aren't in skimpy fur-bikinis, etc, etc- but it's not a giant leap to see others could misinterpret the game of simulated violence s violence against women. Likewise, the 80's dark aesthetic GW has includes a lot of casual violence against women (Watch any R rated movie from the 80's, a woman will get hit and/ or be in a compromising situation). Daemonculaba for one, and that time the Grey Knights needed Sister's blood to destroy Daemons.. Ugh.
We also have the Blue/Pink Aisle dichotomy I learned about when I became a Brony. (Yeah, so THIS hapend.) All the "Boy" toys are together in one aisle, and all the "Girl" toys are together in another, and you don't mix & match so an adult male looking for the limited edition Pinkie Pie Year of the horse is seen as "wierd" and MUST be deviant. But- thankfully nowadays both companies and individuals are breaking out of that mindset. Nerf's 'Rebelle' line just one example, and the amount of female Twitch streamers being another. But there's no breaking a long-held mindset overnight so people still think that 40k is a "Boys with Guns" game. Add to that GW is not really one to, say, LISTEN to their fans and buyers!! So I think even if we had a petition by the whole half of the world with a double X (And some that identify as that but have a Y, I don't judge..) for more non-sexualized or non-Joan of Arc rip off models, they'd be like "Meh."
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Combat Drugs, Stims, Muscle Grafts, Bionics. All exist, all used in differing amounts across different Imperial Guard regiments. Not so much in modern military.
The upper body strength is also a daft argument here. Can they stand, carry and aim a Lasgun? Then they’re plenty good as Imperial Grade Cannon Fodder. Especially given Lasguns and their ammo packs are explicitly described as being lightweight, so this insistence on upper body strength just doesn’t apply to 40K as it does in the real world.
Worth noting that the guard recruits are frequently the top x% of the pdf (depending on world etc).
So, depending on how much they weight physical strength/robustness, that may mean the majority of guard recruits are male (but not all, both as the top women will outperform the majority of men and because other criteria might be more sex neutral), and a higher proportion of pdf troops female.
But if you hit the bar, the Mutinorum is not going to care if you’re male or female.
bibotot wrote: ... then why are there no regiments are women are the majority?
It's a big universe. There probably "are," and your own homebrew regiment certainly can be.
Is there any particular reason why we don't see female-majority regiments in books more often? Or women in combat roles in fiction in general, despite the setting clearly encouraging all genders to take up arms?
Well you see, there are these things called sexism and patriarchy that have impacted both real-world culture and the fictional works they produce. In this essay I will...
I disagree, while sexism and misogyny exist, GW has always been inclusive and welcoming to everyone (like it should be). They have even made multiple public statements about this. I’m only talking about GW brands.
Ok, no. Recent years, yes, GW has made statements, and _is_ better about it.
'Always?' Always has no business being in this statement at all. Lets not bury the reality that this was a young white male hobby & business for many a decade. Warhammer pygmies isn't the only horror story lurking back in the company's past.
AldarionTelcontar wrote: As for in-universe, even if a Catachan woman is stronger than average man, she will still be weaker than Catachan man.
Lmao, imagine trying to use modern science on a planet that is exclusively populated by 80s action heroes. What an absolute joke.
any Catachan units will be raised based on Catachan standards.
Catachan standards aren't based on physical strength alone but cunning, survival ability, and combat skill. Strength alone doesn't keep people alive on Catachan and it is a massively equal society where if an individual doesn't want children, they don't have children, no questions or judgments. The family unit is so non-existent that soldiers from the same family in the same Regiment won't even acknowledge each other in most cases.
Those young white males weren't excluding people who weren't young/white/male, and neither were GW.
Considering that people gave GW flak for putting out a statement that white supremacists and nazis were not welcome? Yeah no, there definitely has been parts of the fanbase that has not been welcoming to people outside the white, male, straight vanilla envelope.
Those young white males weren't excluding people who weren't young/white/male, and neither were GW.
Considering that people gave GW flak for putting out a statement that white supremacists and nazis were not welcome? Yeah no, there definitely has been parts of the fanbase that has not been welcoming to people outside the white, male, straight vanilla envelope.
Just because something is predominantly populated by young white males doesn’t mean that it’s racist or sexist. While racism, sexism, hatred etc… exists, the vast majority of hobbyists are welcoming and understanding (regardless of their skin color or sex), including GW. Unless you have some hard statistical evidence that the majority of hobbyists are like that and the company, my comment still holds.
Love everyone, and welcome everyone. This hobby is absolutely for everyone and anyone.
PS you misquoted me. I did not say “ Lets not bury the reality that this was a young white male hobby & business for many a decade.” idk why it says that in your statement.
Those young white males weren't excluding people who weren't young/white/male, and neither were GW.
Considering that people gave GW flak for putting out a statement that white supremacists and nazis were not welcome? Yeah no, there definitely has been parts of the fanbase that has not been welcoming to people outside the white, male, straight vanilla envelope.
Yeah. It's not like GW has ever said "Warhammer is a boys-only club! Girls are icky and have cooties!" or anything of the sort. But that doesn't mean the hobby is equally as welcoming to people of different genders, or ethnicities, or a whole host of other things.
Those young white males weren't excluding people who weren't young/white/male, and neither were GW.
Considering that people gave GW flak for putting out a statement that white supremacists and nazis were not welcome? Yeah no, there definitely has been parts of the fanbase that has not been welcoming to people outside the white, male, straight vanilla envelope.
Yeah. It's not like GW has ever said "Warhammer is a boys-only club! Girls are icky and have cooties!" or anything of the sort. But that doesn't mean the hobby is equally as welcoming to people of different genders, or ethnicities, or a whole host of other things.
I don’t agree, the hobby is welcoming to everyone equally. It’s not we want everyone to play but we want white males to play a little more than anyone else. Sure, we need more novels and characters that represent everyone but I wouldn’t go as far as saying the hobby isn’t as equally welcoming to everyone.
Again, the hobby is for everyone equally, no matter race, sex, religion etc… I also believe you can’t compare 1980s GW to present day GW. I’ve been part of the hobby for 20 years now and it’s changed drastically, mainly for the better. A big part of the change is also on us. We need to stop with the scapegoating and call out hate when we see it. Hate has no place in the hobby. Unless you’re a Xenos player or Chaos player….
While the hobby generally is welcoming to all there are always going to be elements that are not.
It's a hobby which again generally accepts and supports all. However there are certain people, as in any group that will always try and force their views onto others. A prime example that I have personally encountered on a few occasions has been the type we all know that says you're doing it wrong only their way is right.
It's people like them who mean I don't game in-store or at a club.
Those young white males weren't excluding people who weren't young/white/male, and neither were GW.
Considering that people gave GW flak for putting out a statement that white supremacists and nazis were not welcome? Yeah no, there definitely has been parts of the fanbase that has not been welcoming to people outside the white, male, straight vanilla envelope.
Just because something is predominantly populated by young white males doesn’t mean that it’s racist or sexist. While racism, sexism, hatred etc… exists, the vast majority of hobbyists are welcoming and understanding (regardless of their skin color or sex), including GW. Unless you have some hard statistical evidence that the majority of hobbyists are like that and the company, my comment still holds.
Love everyone, and welcome everyone. This hobby is absolutely for everyone and anyone.
PS you misquoted me. I did not say “ Lets not bury the reality that this was a young white male hobby & business for many a decade.” idk why it says that in your statement.
It says that in my statement because _I_ said that. It wasn't a quote, that's how your 'always' statement came across to me. You can pretend the 1980s GW was a different company if you want to, but that simply isn't true. I'm not a fan of writing history because it sounds happier. Things are better, but they were pretty bad. And by this very thread, very clearly isn't all gone.
Those young white males weren't excluding people who weren't young/white/male, and neither were GW.
Considering that people gave GW flak for putting out a statement that white supremacists and nazis were not welcome? Yeah no, there definitely has been parts of the fanbase that has not been welcoming to people outside the white, male, straight vanilla envelope.
Yeah. It's not like GW has ever said "Warhammer is a boys-only club! Girls are icky and have cooties!" or anything of the sort. But that doesn't mean the hobby is equally as welcoming to people of different genders, or ethnicities, or a whole host of other things.
I don’t agree, the hobby is welcoming to everyone equally. It’s not we want everyone to play but we want white males to play a little more than anyone else. Sure, we need more novels and characters that represent everyone but I wouldn’t go as far as saying the hobby isn’t as equally welcoming to everyone.
Again, the hobby is for everyone equally, no matter race, sex, religion etc…
Sounds like your local community is pretty welcoming and healthy. However, I regret to inform you that our hobby does, unfortunately, have its share of unpleasant people with less healthy views on the world. The standard gamer "boys club" culture that you see among video gamers is present here, as are a certain subset of people who are a little too into the fascism the setting is meant to be satirizing.
I also believe you can’t compare 1980s GW to present day GW. I’ve been part of the hobby for 20 years now and it’s changed drastically, mainly for the better. A big part of the change is also on us. We need to stop with the scapegoating and call out hate when we see it. Hate has no place in the hobby. Unless you’re a Xenos player or Chaos player….
Okay, so you do agree that things weren't always handled as well as they are now and that there is occassionally hate to be called out? I don't think anyone is claiming that the hobby itself is super unwelcoming, but the percentage of our ranks that tend to be misogynistic, gatekeepy, etc. seems to be noticably higher than in the... I don't know... knitting community. Or artist community. Or basically any community that wasn't seen as a "nerd space" in the 90s.
Great strides have been made.
A lot of places are chill and good-not perfect, but nothing is.
But that doesn't mean there's nothing left to do to improve on accessibility for communities.
Self appointed gatekeepers make me laugh. Genuinely laugh. Because it’s such a pointless, aimless endeavour. Just silly little online echo chambers utterly powerless to control anything outside of that echo chamber.
If you don’t want to play with a given demographic? Bit weird, but you do you. Because there’s plenty of others who will play with them, and there’s not a damn thing the weird little gatekeeper can do about it.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Combat Drugs, Stims, Muscle Grafts, Bionics. All exist, all used in differing amounts across different Imperial Guard regiments. Not so much in modern military.
The upper body strength is also a daft argument here. Can they stand, carry and aim a Lasgun? Then they’re plenty good as Imperial Grade Cannon Fodder. Especially given Lasguns and their ammo packs are explicitly described as being lightweight, so this insistence on upper body strength just doesn’t apply to 40K as it does in the real world.
Also, increased muscle mass = increased calorie requirements to maintain that muscle mass. There's a reason that no military in the modern world is trying to staff their combat forces exclusively with people with the physique of a Mr. Olympia.
The Imperium already has the space marine beefcakes to waste resources maintaining inefficient physiques on, they don't need to import that kind of thinking to the guard as well.
That is actually a very good reason for why men would be preferred.
Yes, strength is not a decisive element in combat. In fact, even during Middle Ages, soldiers were preferred to NOT be hulking Gregor Clegane types - in part due to food issue you mention. But due to greater amount of testosterone, males will have more strength and endurance for given body weight. Males also have much lower minimum amount of body fat they can maintain while still being healthy, are more efficient in locomotion (due to narrower pelvis), and have better balance of upper body strength vs lower body strength than females.
And even in modern military, a lot of stuff (e.g. digging trenches) requires decent amount of strength and endurance. Nothing like Ahnold physique - think more Bruce Lee - but definitely something men are better at. You mentioning weight of lasgun misses the point by, like, light years. Yes, lasguns may be lighter than modern rifles. But even if that is the case, the rest of the pack is unlikely to be much lighter (in fact, historically speaking, modern soldiers are the most encumbered ever). Not to mention that infantryman's most important weapon is actually his shovel, especially for the type of warfare Imperium oftentimes practices.
Results
Male are 15.7% heavier and 7.4% taller and presented a percentage of fat mass (17.2 ± 1.8%) significantly (p < 0.001) lower than that of women subject (25.0 ± 2.5%) (difference male vs female for fat mass: -45.5%). HG, BS, 5JT and SJ performances were significantly higher in males (44 ± 5 kg, 141 ± 2 kg, 11 ± 1 m and 32.4 ± 2,7 cm, respectively) than in females (31.0 ± 4 kg, 81.6 ± 13 kg, 8.7 ± 0.7 m and 21.1 ± 1.9 cm, respectively). In the control (unloaded) condition, the relative difference between males and females represented 23.5% and 34.7% of the male performances for 5JT and SJ, respectively. In the weighted condition, the relative difference between weighted males and females still represented 11.7% and 23.8% of the weighted male performances for 5JT and SJ, respectively. Cancelling the sex difference in fat mass by adding weight in males reduced by 50.1% the sex difference during 5JT and 31.4% and 71.7% for hight and power results, respectively during SJ test.
Conclusion
During short and maximal exercise, male performed better with their hands, back and legs than female students. Excess fat for female students has a disadvantageous effect on vertical and horizontal jumps performances. The persistence of sex differences after weighting of male students indicates that body fat is responsible for 30 to 70% of the observed differences between sexes performances and power outcomes during jump tests.
These data revealed that the difference between male and female performance time increased with event distance from 8.6 percent to 11 percent from shortest to longest sprint events (60 to 400 meters).
Additionally, within-race analysis of each 10-meter segment of the 100-meter event revealed a more pronounced pattern across distance – sex differences increased from a low of 5.6 percent for the first segment to a high of 14.2 percent in the last segment.
And you cannot fix that by genetic engineering... except by making women, well, no longer women. A.K.A. by turning them into men. In which case, why bother when you can just recruit more men?
The ART is faster than the VRT in medical students. Furthermore, male medical students have faster RTs as compared to female medical students for both auditory as well as visual stimuli. Regularly exercising medical students have faster RTs when compared with medical students with sedentary lifestyles.
Nine hundred and thirty men, women, and children ranging in age from 6 to 84 were tested to determine the differences between males and females of various ages in their speed of reaction and movement and to ascertain whether or not a relationship exists between reaction time and movement time. Results indicated that (a) males are faster than females in both reaction and movement; (b) speed of both functions increases up to early adulthood and then decreases; (c) peak speed is maintained longer by males in movement and longer by females in reaction; and (d) in the majority of groups studied, no relationship exists between speed of reaction and speed of movement.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Combat Drugs, Stims, Muscle Grafts, Bionics. All exist, all used in differing amounts across different Imperial Guard regiments. Not so much in modern military.
The upper body strength is also a daft argument here. Can they stand, carry and aim a Lasgun? Then they’re plenty good as Imperial Grade Cannon Fodder. Especially given Lasguns and their ammo packs are explicitly described as being lightweight, so this insistence on upper body strength just doesn’t apply to 40K as it does in the real world.
Worth noting that the guard recruits are frequently the top x% of the pdf (depending on world etc).
So, depending on how much they weight physical strength/robustness, that may mean the majority of guard recruits are male (but not all, both as the top women will outperform the majority of men and because other criteria might be more sex neutral), and a higher proportion of pdf troops female.
But if you hit the bar, the Mutinorum is not going to care if you’re male or female.
IG soldiers already are the top, however (they are - or are supposed to be - the cream of the crop of any given world). So top women will still fall below top men - meaning that, if anything, IG should have fewer women among its combat personnel compared to PDF. And factors I noted previously in the post mean that if you go for universal standard... at least 95% of your recruits will be men. So while female Guard regiment can exist, they should be exceedingly rare. And if Guard goes for mixed regiments instead of all-female ones, then basically no IG regiments will have female majority (barring few statistical freak accidents)... you will have 90%-99% men with some women thrown in.
If you look at football (a.k.a. soccer a.k.a. Association Football)... that is one example of a sport where large amount of physical strength is not needed - endurance, coordination and reflexes matter far more. Yet even there, boys U-15 team performed significantly better than women's national team.
AldarionTelcontar wrote: As for in-universe, even if a Catachan woman is stronger than average man, she will still be weaker than Catachan man.
Lmao, imagine trying to use modern science on a planet that is exclusively populated by 80s action heroes. What an absolute joke.
Real-world standards apply up to the point where they explicitly do not apply.
If we use your measures, joke would be us attempting to discuss ANYTHING. Might as well shut down the background section of the site since, apparently, logic need not apply.
any Catachan units will be raised based on Catachan standards.
Catachan standards aren't based on physical strength alone but cunning, survival ability, and combat skill. Strength alone doesn't keep people alive on Catachan and it is a massively equal society where if an individual doesn't want children, they don't have children, no questions or judgments. The family unit is so non-existent that soldiers from the same family in the same Regiment won't even acknowledge each other in most cases.
And physical strength alone is not the only area where men are better than women. And if Catachan really is a Death World (and we know it is), then any notion of a "massively equal society" should have led to their extinction long time ago.
RaptorusRex wrote: Gotta love how an account with ~6 posts comes in to derail the thread based on their politicized understanding of human biology.
Learn some science, please. There is nothing "politicized" about my understanding of biology.
And I didn't "derail the thread". I was answering the OP's question:
bibotot wrote: Is there any particular reason why we don't see female-majority regiments in books more often? Or women in combat roles in fiction in general, despite the setting clearly encouraging all genders to take up arms?
Just because you hate the answer doesn't mean you get to call me out on answering the quite clearly stated question.
IG soldiers already are the top, however (they are - or are supposed to be - the cream of the crop of any given world). So top women will still fall below top men - meaning that, if anything, IG should have fewer women among its combat personnel compared to PDF. And factors I noted previously in the post mean that if you go for universal standard... at least 95% of your recruits will be men. So while female Guard regiment can exist, they should be exceedingly rare. And if Guard goes for mixed regiments instead of all-female ones, then basically no IG regiments will have female majority (barring few statistical freak accidents)... you will have 90%-99% men with some women thrown in.
=> of course only as long both sexes are recruited at all. There might be lots of reasons for purely female PDFs. The simplest that comes to my mind given the mentioned better average strength of males: On a planet with lots of heavy work like a mining world or Industrial world, there might well be a priority to get the phyically fittest indivivuums in production. The security forces that by and large "just" have to carry lasguns (especially in motorized regiments that don't have to carry that much kit) can be filled up with less physically impressive specimens. On such a world, a purely female PDF would make a lot of sense, so the "top of the crop" would be purely female too. The Munitorum would not object, as long as the ordered boots on the ground are there and equiped.
AldarionTelcontar wrote: Real-world standards apply up to the point where they explicitly do not apply.
If we use your measures, joke would be us attempting to discuss ANYTHING. Might as well shut down the background section of the site since, apparently, logic need not apply.
Hey, I'm not the one that picked the worst possible example. You chose to use the extremely silly killer planet populated by action heroes as your example, and I'm debating that choice.
But even if you had picked a world like Cadia, Tallarn, Mordian, or Armageddon, then you'd still be wrong because the Guard doesn't recruit based on standards that a modern army would use. The Guard recruits people who are human enough to hold a Lasgun.
There will be exceptions such as Vostroya where all firstborn sons must serve as punishment for their choice to remain neutral during the Horus Heresy but for everywhere else it's "Can you hold a gun? Congratulations, you are hired".
That's the Total War mentality of the Imperium. Size, shape, skin tone, or special body parts don't matter because the Guard cannot afford to turn away soldiers.
And physical strength alone is not the only area where men are better than women. And if Catachan really is a Death World (and we know it is), then any notion of a "massively equal society" should have led to their extinction long time ago.
Again, it's a massively silly planet and the whole idea of it maintaining a pre-industrial population size has been discussed and debated many times as being very silly. The canon population of Catachan is half that of Bejing for crying out loud.
Nothing on that planet makes any sense whatsoever.
Not when population density is so high that birth rates aren't an issue, especially when the Imperium can and will ship entire populations from planet to planet to suit its needs. Fenris and Armageddon are good examples of that, the former had thousands of tribes moved to artificially increase the pool of recruits for the VIth Legion and the latter had most of its population replaced after the 1st War with people who weren't aware of Chaos.
The Imperium has worlds chocking with population in levels of extreme overpopulation that we'd consider madness. Even after 10,000 years of trench warfare, they've survived and sustained the greater part of the Imperium. Clearly population and breeding are not a concern at all.
Indeed when you consider the sheer mind-breaking horrors of warfare in the setting; anyone who can hold a gun and hold the line is wanted. Bodies are more important than your genetic make-up. So long as you're not so mutated that you're considered a mutant to be purged. Even then there are several breeds of mutant that are still used by the Imperium every day - eg Rattlings and Ogryns
Again the Imperium army isn't fussy at the large scale. It just wants bodies for the meat-grinder. It will take them from worlds like Catachan, where the average person is physically superior to what we have on Earth; it will take them from Hive worlds like Necromunda, where the toxic lifestyle means many will likely have lungscarring and other imperfections. Despite their resilience they are likely less than they could be. The trenches don't care, the lasgun doesn't care, the Xeno doesn't care; nore does the mutant nor the heretic (though the heretic likely would want your shoes because they are better than the rags and ruin they have)
Hive Worlds are also used to farm populations to settle new planets because they're so overflowing with people.
We're not talking about one or two planets with massive populations, we're talking about 10 to 25% of all Imperial worlds being a Hive World with an average population of half a trillion and an upward limit of (X).
If the Imperium needs to move those people, it uses those people to mine the resources, manufacture the materials, and construct the ships to move them, at which point all the people who were planning to be moved have been supplemented by the next two or three generations of people.
In an immediate warzone, the locals are going to get conscripted as well even if they end up not being very good then a local battlegroup can easily be reinforced by a few billion people with some surplus Flak gear and an autogun. If the threat is defeated then the Imperium ships more people in to replace the dead and if the threat isn't defeated then those billions are dead or enslaved which means the Imperium has lost them.
Heck lets not forget the Imperium uses people to pull back the guns on their warships. Those massive cannon have people pulling ropes to draw the gun back. Granted its likely got some ancient piston system that helps, but the Imperium sees no problem at all with people doing that harsh manual labour.
Not to mention the myriad of other roles where they use people rather than machines. Heck they breed bodies to get brains for cogitators and servitors and there's ample evidence that not ever brain that ends up running those is braindead made for it.
If a population gets low enough, the Mechanicus can always make more pod people.
Most Magi and Tech-Priests are pod people, even Cawl was a pod person.
Also, the casualty rates of battles and wars in the 40K universe are actually very small compared to actual historical wars, because the same people who wrote that 1 million space marines can be important on the galactic stage also wrote how many imperial guard are involved in wars spanning the entire surface of a planet.
For example, there were 1 million more French and British forces at the Somme alone than there were Imperium forces in the entire Armageddon subsector at the onset of the third war for Armageddon. There weren't enough Imperial forces in an entire subsector to attack a single section of the line on one front in World War 1.
For another instance, WW2 resulted in the loss of around 3% of the total world population over the 6 years of the war. If wars in the 40K universe were to be equal to that, then Terra alone (population in the quadrillions, supposedly) would have to lose at least 13,698,630,137 people per day, every day for those 6 years to pull its own weight in those casualty numbers.
They could stand to up the numbers a bit, but you can also view it as logistical bottlenecking. If you have a fleet of 20-30 ships, even if they are massive ships with crews in the hundreds of thousands, you're only going to be able to carry a few hundred thousand troops at most per vessel. Maybe 3/4 a million in a dedicated transport. But you're going to have to dedicate a massive amount of your space to not people, food, ammunition, vehicles, and other supplies. After all, you're probably going to go months or years without resupply ships arriving so you need to have everything with you to sustain the soldiers you brought for potentially years.
This would really cap invasions and counter invasions at maybe a few million troops being dropped in at any one time.
Of course this would be ignoring any indigenous people on the planet itself who could be quickly armed in their 10s of millions quite easily on a heavily populated world, or maybe not, depending on how much weaponry you have laying around. Perhaps the thing preventing the Imperium from arming billions upon billions is simply arming them. And would explain why even a lasgun is more valuable than a dozen guardsmen. yes, lasguns are cheap. But humans are even cheaper, so cheap we can't arm them all even if we wanted to. The Imperium can only make millions and millions of lasguns per annum, not billions and billions.
Gert wrote: If a population gets low enough, the Mechanicus can always make more pod people.
Most Magi and Tech-Priests are pod people, even Cawl was a pod person.
Yep, loved that scene in "The great work" when the rest of thh pod peeps we going through the left or right doors- Cawl after speaking up gets to go through the CENTER door.
Whelp, this topic looks weird now (TL;DR [Skimmied]) But I recommend Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond which has a good section all about differences in ethnicities of humans aren't as big as we think. Same goes for the sexes- I try not to talk down or mansplain to a woman since I consider them capable of going out there and doing their due diligence.
Granted, I had a trans friend and when Jason became Jessica she out and out stated that the hormones were giving her brain fog and she felt all emotional all the time.. But as I said- hormones. They'll do that.
Okay- semi-back to topic after all that: I think this is why Human tau Auxiliaries see the benefit of breaking away with the Imperium. The Tau give them guns and protection and don't (outright) ask for much in return, other than to serve the greater good. So for the Damocles backwaters, it comes down to supply line issues, and when a bunch of genestealers are running around your hive sewers, it looks much better to have some Pew Pew pulse rifles than wait for eventual help/ exterminatus.
Grey Templar wrote: They could stand to up the numbers a bit, but you can also view it as logistical bottlenecking. If you have a fleet of 20-30 ships, even if they are massive ships with crews in the hundreds of thousands, you're only going to be able to carry a few hundred thousand troops at most per vessel. Maybe 3/4 a million in a dedicated transport. But you're going to have to dedicate a massive amount of your space to not people, food, ammunition, vehicles, and other supplies. After all, you're probably going to go months or years without resupply ships arriving so you need to have everything with you to sustain the soldiers you brought for potentially years.
The other thing is once you go beyond a certain point the numbers become meaningless to most readers/people.
Once people have no way to relate to the numbers and once they numbers start to get pretty long and to the point you need a calculator to work them out; it goes from information to just a background noise for most people.
Even if it means that the setting has really wonky numbers if you look at it logically; it makes sense to the average person in a way they can connect with it.
Warhammer might be the most extreme with examples like marines; but other books and shows do similar things. In the end its not actually important how many people there are in the setting and how many die; what's important is that the numbers feel vast and the setting feels big and it seems horrific and it carries that tone. Similarly how few marines there are doesn't matter so long as the readers get the impression that these are the elite of the elite and are super rare. Though I'd argue that 1K per chapter is indeed a very very tiny number.
At least with the 1 million marines, it seems to even in universe be seen as mostly a propaganda number. I recall in the old 4th edition codex it listed out the strengths of the Ultramarine companies and if you added everything up it came out to somewhere in the 1400 marines range, and that is for the Ultramarines. Probably the only chapter to be in full compliance with the Codex.
The line has never been that there are actually for real only ever 1 million space marines. Its more that the Imperium says there are a million, despite there being no accurate count of chapters or a census within those chapters or that many of those chapters do not give a feth about the Codex. So even in-universe the number is basically acknowledged to be false.
Folk also need to keep in mind distinct planets like Catachan are very much the exception, not the rule.
The Imperium is said to contain roughly 1,000,000 worlds. And all of them will have some kind of population. From barely populated gas planet mining platforms, right up to Hive Worlds such as Necromunda, where there’s no way to conduct an accurate census, and even Hive Primus is roughly estimated to have a population well in excess of modern day Earth’s.
So the Imperium is just never, ever going to hurt for bodies. Ever. Yet, because of the scale of the treats it faces? It still cannot afford to be sniffy in who is recruited into the Imperial Guard.
And on that silly, silly argument about Upper Body Strength? I myself am a big sod. A strapping 6’2”. And whilst by no means beefcake, I’m possessed of reasonable strength. Certainly in terms of lifting, I’m stronger than my mate Chris. Or, to give him his proper name? Ninja Chris. For whilst a mere fart in a jar at 5’8” or so? He’s been into Wing Chun for…years.
We had a play fight once. I could barely lay a finger on him. Because training matters. You may well be able to bench press a planet with your peen, but if you’ve no combat training of any kind? Someone with combat training is still going to have an advantage.
Dodging matters. Going for the hurty bits matters. Being able to predict your opponent matters. Skill is important, and often a deciding factor.
What kind of criteria do we think planets tend to actually use when they're deciding who to send for a tithe?
My understanding is that guard tithes are generally pulled from the PDF, right? I feel like many planets might not really give their troops a chance to do the same kind of "soldiering" that would be expected of them in the guard. I doubt many of the recruits from thoroughly-industrialized/urbanized worlds have had a lot of opportunities to dig trenches, for instance. And unless your planet is regularly or recently threatened by some major invasion, your mission experience is probably mostly just clearing out underfunded cultists, putting down the occassional angry mob, etc., right?
So who's looking at what stats to decide what the "cream of the crop" is for the average imperial world? Are they just checking average marksmanship scores or something? Is somebody actively measuring which troops haul sandbags around faster?
Asking because all the talk of upper body strength has me wondering whether such a thing really translates into whatever recruiting metrics they use for the tithe.
(This is assuming that someone is actually making a good faith attempt to recruit the cream of the crop of whatever. I imagine plenty of worlds just send the eldest child of each household or try to get away with press ganging a bunch of gangers or whatever.)
I don't think it's explicit that it's the "best" of the PDF, just about 10% IIRC.
So it's probably just names selected from a program or in some cases volunteers plus whoever wants to sign up from non-PDF sources.
Gert wrote: I don't think it's explicit that it's the "best" of the PDF, just about 10% IIRC.
So it's probably just names selected from a program or in some cases volunteers plus whoever wants to sign up from non-PDF sources.
IIRC, there is no explicit rule as such. However, tithed troops are supposed to meet a minimum standard- if they don't, the punishment is great (usually the governor's life is forfeit). Therefore many worlds recruit Guard tithes from their best PDF units to minimise this risk. This is by no means universal (for example, Cadian units were selected for Guard vs PDF randomly) and may not even be a majority.
Overread wrote: The Imperium has worlds chocking with population in levels of extreme overpopulation that we'd consider madness. Even after 10,000 years of trench warfare, they've survived and sustained the greater part of the Imperium. Clearly population and breeding are not a concern at all.
Indeed when you consider the sheer mind-breaking horrors of warfare in the setting; anyone who can hold a gun and hold the line is wanted. Bodies are more important than your genetic make-up. So long as you're not so mutated that you're considered a mutant to be purged. Even then there are several breeds of mutant that are still used by the Imperium every day - eg Rattlings and Ogryns
Again the Imperium army isn't fussy at the large scale. It just wants bodies for the meat-grinder. It will take them from worlds like Catachan, where the average person is physically superior to what we have on Earth; it will take them from Hive worlds like Necromunda, where the toxic lifestyle means many will likely have lungscarring and other imperfections. Despite their resilience they are likely less than they could be. The trenches don't care, the lasgun doesn't care, the Xeno doesn't care; nore does the mutant nor the heretic (though the heretic likely would want your shoes because they are better than the rags and ruin they have)
That is just not true, just as it is not true that you can run an economy effective centrally for the sheer amount of data even with a far more effective information system and cooperative nature that is the pricing mechanism on a world, neither can you run a military at a galactic scale in a way that would make it matter that you have population farms due to the logisctial irreliability of the warp.
The fact that i have to explain this shows a severe lack of logistical knowledge to the point that the whole discussion is basically moot. Having to have a population farm and having that in reach of a reliable enough warp route severly cuts down your whole argument to the point of nonsensical considering even internal sector travell ranges from sluggish to loterry like chances to basically impossible to phenomena understood or not understood.
Why do you think all planets are mandated to field PDF's? Because the IoM knows that its logistics are dead without decentralised structures, and these decentralised structures have not the luxury in many cases to draft willy nilly into reproduction capable individuals of the species else there's not much left depending upon enemy, and the reaction time for the guard is due to that alone horrific, NVM that production often also is localised for basic equipment aswell, hence why recruiting without regard is most certainly not something done unless the situation has become anyways a loss on that particular locality.
You also see that when the IoM goes to the offensive and ammasses armies, those are indeed drawn from population farms / centers but their weight is basically a continuous stream, ala flood gates and then yeah, it doesn't matter. Problem is the IoM rarely goes to the offensive in such a manner and often the offensives are so delayed due to logistical issues again that the localised nature of combat around planets makes their effectiveness questionable endeavours in itself. Which is also the reason why the tau did win their little strife with the IoM.
Gert wrote:We're not talking about one or two planets with massive populations, we're talking about 10 to 25% of all Imperial worlds being a Hive World with an average population of half a trillion and an upward limit of (X).
Whilst I agree with your overall point, the only canon number I have ever come across for hive worlds lists approximately 32,000 out of the rough 1,000,000 worlds of the Imperium. About 3%. Still a vast population base though.
For the record, I don't think this would include planets like Verghast, where the biggest hive is barely more populous than modern Tokyo.
A Town Called Malus wrote:
For example, there were 1 million more French and British forces at the Somme alone than there were Imperium forces in the entire Armageddon subsector at the onset of the third war for Armageddon. There weren't enough Imperial forces in an entire subsector to attack a single section of the line on one front in World War 1.
What numbers are you using for Armageddon subsector?
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Folk also need to keep in mind distinct planets like Catachan are very much the exception, not the rule.
The Imperium is said to contain roughly 1,000,000 worlds. And all of them will have some kind of population. From barely populated gas planet mining platforms, right up to Hive Worlds such as Necromunda, where there’s no way to conduct an accurate census, and even Hive Primus is roughly estimated to have a population well in excess of modern day Earth’s.
So the Imperium is just never, ever going to hurt for bodies. Ever. Yet, because of the scale of the treats it faces? It still cannot afford to be sniffy in who is recruited into the Imperial Guard.
And on that silly, silly argument about Upper Body Strength? I myself am a big sod. A strapping 6’2”. And whilst by no means beefcake, I’m possessed of reasonable strength. Certainly in terms of lifting, I’m stronger than my mate Chris. Or, to give him his proper name? Ninja Chris. For whilst a mere fart in a jar at 5’8” or so? He’s been into Wing Chun for…years.
We had a play fight once. I could barely lay a finger on him. Because training matters. You may well be able to bench press a planet with your peen, but if you’ve no combat training of any kind? Someone with combat training is still going to have an advantage.
Dodging matters. Going for the hurty bits matters. Being able to predict your opponent matters. Skill is important, and often a deciding factor.
In a play fight, a whole other scenario than relevant here, especially as soon as pointy bits get involved or blunt objects in which endurance and strength become deciding factors. Or whoever is faster with an sidearm.
Also you are so close with your initial argument and yet so far. The problem is one of distance logistics. It don't matter that the IoM can throw bodies at a problem on paper in theory. Because in practice it would first need to raise the army for that campaign especially if it is a newer campaign, then collect that army on a jump off point then wait on the navy to do the same thing beforehand and potentially wait on response of more independent forces like marines and more importantly mechanicus depending upon infrastructure and force requirements and then initiate the first battles.
Clausewitz explains that rather well, Time and force are a correlation. Hence why a lesser force with speed can even win at all incidentally an modus operandi a lot of factions use against the IoM as an aside and the sole reason why marines in their small numbers are even somewhat relevant in the setting at all.
I seem to remember that the criteria for "best 10 %" were up to the tithing planet. And as long as the munitorum is not obviously cheated ("Yeah, being blind, one legged or paraplegic is deemed top 10% on our planet!") they don't really care. Besides strength, endurance and the like, good morale and fervent adherence to the imperial creed is a perfect quality marker as well. Especially when it is expected that the Regiment will face of against Heretic forces and resistance to taint would be of high interest.
One word regarding the "numbers game" though. On a big scale I completely agree with the posters that mentioned that the imperium does not hurt for - in this case - (wo)manpower. But on a localized scale the points that have been brought up regarding birth rates etc. might be relevant. I might be wrong but I think there were some situations in the fluff, where a localized crisis turned up and the local planets were tithed in a frequency, that it made a real dent in their population. So not "you have 100 billion people, just give us 1 Million every 5 years" and more "You have 100 Million, we'll need 1 Million every 2 Months for the next 10 years, since we cannot expect reinforcements from elsewhere soon". In such cases the planetary goverment should indeed have an eye on the sex balance of the soldiers they send off world, especially as those cannot be expected to return.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Folk also need to keep in mind distinct planets like Catachan are very much the exception, not the rule.
The Imperium is said to contain roughly 1,000,000 worlds. And all of them will have some kind of population. From barely populated gas planet mining platforms, right up to Hive Worlds such as Necromunda, where there’s no way to conduct an accurate census, and even Hive Primus is roughly estimated to have a population well in excess of modern day Earth’s.
So the Imperium is just never, ever going to hurt for bodies. Ever. Yet, because of the scale of the treats it faces? It still cannot afford to be sniffy in who is recruited into the Imperial Guard.
And on that silly, silly argument about Upper Body Strength? I myself am a big sod. A strapping 6’2”. And whilst by no means beefcake, I’m possessed of reasonable strength. Certainly in terms of lifting, I’m stronger than my mate Chris. Or, to give him his proper name? Ninja Chris. For whilst a mere fart in a jar at 5’8” or so? He’s been into Wing Chun for…years.
We had a play fight once. I could barely lay a finger on him. Because training matters. You may well be able to bench press a planet with your peen, but if you’ve no combat training of any kind? Someone with combat training is still going to have an advantage.
Dodging matters. Going for the hurty bits matters. Being able to predict your opponent matters. Skill is important, and often a deciding factor.
In a play fight, a whole other scenario than relevant here, especially as soon as pointy bits get involved or blunt objects in which endurance and strength become deciding factors. Or whoever is faster with an sidearm.
Also you are so close with your initial argument and yet so far. The problem is one of distance logistics. It don't matter that the IoM can throw bodies at a problem on paper in theory. Because in practice it would first need to raise the army for that campaign especially if it is a newer campaign, then collect that army on a jump off point then wait on the navy to do the same thing beforehand and potentially wait on response of more independent forces like marines and more importantly mechanicus depending upon infrastructure and force requirements and then initiate the first battles.
Clausewitz explains that rather well, Time and force are a correlation. Hence why a lesser force with speed can even win at all incidentally an modus operandi a lot of factions use against the IoM as an aside and the sole reason why marines in their small numbers are even somewhat relevant in the setting at all.
Imperial logistics are a separate albeit related topic IMO. The true unreliability of warp travel in particular is highly debatable given the Imperium relies on regular and massive interstellar travel for its worlds to function on a regional and galactic scale. My personal thoughts are that warp travel is usually safe and predictable to fairly tight margins of error, but gets dramatically more dangerous if there are local inclement warp conditions (squalls and storms) or around major warzones (from the impact of death and violence on the warp). Clearly most ships reach their destinations in reasonable timeframes, and repeatedly do so for hundreds or even thousands of years in many cases (based on age of vessels).
Haighus wrote: Whilst I agree with your overall point, the only canon number I have ever come across for hive worlds lists approximately 32,000 out of the rough 1,000,000 worlds of the Imperium. About 3%. Still a vast population base though.
For the record, I don't think this would include planets like Verghast, where the biggest hive is barely more populous than modern Tokyo.
Urban Conquest from 2019 used that figure, though it also caveats that with the whole "The Imperium doesn't really know for sure" but as we agree, the wider point stands.
Verghast is listed as a Hive World but as with all things, there can be those that hit below the average. Vervunhive never really came across as particularly large as far as Hive cities go while Ferrazoica and Vannick were said to be smaller than their larger sibling. Verghast didn't seem to be quite as colonised as other Hive Worlds as well, likely due to the fact that they were in the Sabbat Worlds, and with a huge Chaos empire on their doorstep, the Imperium was likely a bit cautious of sending billions of people to a planet where they could very likely end up as soldiers or slaves of Chaos.
What numbers are you using for Armageddon subsector?
Helsreach and the Armageddon Codex I would assume. Armageddon has always been a very cool but very cursed warzone though and it's been long known that the numbers are very very iffy for a supposedly sub-sector scale war.
Pyroalchi wrote: One word regarding the "numbers game" though. On a big scale I completely agree with the posters that mentioned that the imperium does not hurt for - in this case - (wo)manpower. But on a localized scale the points that have been brought up regarding birth rates etc. might be relevant. I might be wrong but I think there were some situations in the fluff, where a localized crisis turned up and the local planets were tithed in a frequency, that it made a real dent in their population. So not "you have 100 billion people, just give us 1 Million every 5 years" and more "You have 100 Million, we'll need 1 Million every 2 Months for the next 10 years, since we cannot expect reinforcements from elsewhere soon". In such cases the planetary goverment should indeed have an eye on the sex balance of the soldiers they send off world, especially as those cannot be expected to return.
That would be a very specific circumstance though, and pretty rare in the grand scheme of things while also being something the Imperium could fix simply by scooping up a bunch of spares from a nearby world and dumping them on that world.
Imperial logistics are a separate albeit related topic IMO. The true unreliability of warp travel in particular is highly debatable given the Imperium relies on regular and massive interstellar travel for its worlds to function on a regional and galactic scale. My personal thoughts are that warp travel is usually safe and predictable to fairly tight margins of error, but gets dramatically more dangerous if there are local inclement warp conditions (squalls and storms) or around major warzones (from the impact of death and violence on the warp). Clearly most ships reach their destinations in reasonable timeframes, and repeatedly do so for hundreds or even thousands of years in many cases (based on age of vessels).
Estimating the length of a Warp Jump, at least for the Imperium, is extremely difficult and inconsistent. As the Warp is ever-shifting, determining the length of a jump is difficult for even even semi-fluctuating passages. The Questio Logisticus branch of the Administratum is dedicated to this difficult task.[11]
One example is given for travel between the Hive World of Proxx and the Mining World of Hephastian. These planets are separated between dozens of light years and a standard voyage in the warp will take one to six weeks. However some voyages have been recorded as taking 1,200 years and another in as little as two minutes. 32% of the voyages have yet to reach their destination.
That would be a very specific circumstance though, and pretty rare in the grand scheme of things while also being something the Imperium could fix simply by scooping up a bunch of spares from a nearby world and dumping them on that world.
Overread wrote: The Imperium has worlds chocking with population in levels of extreme overpopulation that we'd consider madness. Even after 10,000 years of trench warfare, they've survived and sustained the greater part of the Imperium. Clearly population and breeding are not a concern at all.
Indeed when you consider the sheer mind-breaking horrors of warfare in the setting; anyone who can hold a gun and hold the line is wanted. Bodies are more important than your genetic make-up. So long as you're not so mutated that you're considered a mutant to be purged. Even then there are several breeds of mutant that are still used by the Imperium every day - eg Rattlings and Ogryns
Again the Imperium army isn't fussy at the large scale. It just wants bodies for the meat-grinder. It will take them from worlds like Catachan, where the average person is physically superior to what we have on Earth; it will take them from Hive worlds like Necromunda, where the toxic lifestyle means many will likely have lungscarring and other imperfections. Despite their resilience they are likely less than they could be. The trenches don't care, the lasgun doesn't care, the Xeno doesn't care; nore does the mutant nor the heretic (though the heretic likely would want your shoes because they are better than the rags and ruin they have)
That is just not true, just as it is not true that you can run an economy effective centrally for the sheer amount of data even with a far more effective information system and cooperative nature that is the pricing mechanism on a world, neither can you run a military at a galactic scale in a way that would make it matter that you have population farms due to the logisctial irreliability of the warp.
The fact that i have to explain this shows a severe lack of logistical knowledge to the point that the whole discussion is basically moot. Having to have a population farm and having that in reach of a reliable enough warp route severly cuts down your whole argument to the point of nonsensical considering even internal sector travell ranges from sluggish to loterry like chances to basically impossible to phenomena understood or not understood.
Why do you think all planets are mandated to field PDF's? Because the IoM knows that its logistics are dead without decentralised structures, and these decentralised structures have not the luxury in many cases to draft willy nilly into reproduction capable individuals of the species else there's not much left depending upon enemy, and the reaction time for the guard is due to that alone horrific, NVM that production often also is localised for basic equipment aswell, hence why recruiting without regard is most certainly not something done unless the situation has become anyways a loss on that particular locality.
You also see that when the IoM goes to the offensive and ammasses armies, those are indeed drawn from population farms / centers but their weight is basically a continuous stream, ala flood gates and then yeah, it doesn't matter. Problem is the IoM rarely goes to the offensive in such a manner and often the offensives are so delayed due to logistical issues again that the localised nature of combat around planets makes their effectiveness questionable endeavours in itself. Which is also the reason why the tau did win their little strife with the IoM.
I wasn't really talking about logistics though?
I was making a point that after 10K years of warfare the Imperium is generally very healthy in terms of population output as a whole. Yes some sectors will have less and some will have more; but by and large the body of humanity has maintained a very high population level. Not as high as Orks or Tyranids in breeding; but also not a dwindling number like Eldar. And yes if they had not been at war, and if it wasn't half insane in how its run the population numbers would likely be way better.
My point was that the armies of the Imperium care more about the quantity of their troops than the quality at the large scale.
I wasn't really making any reference to specific population farms being the cornerstone of the war effort; nor about the logistics. If anything my point supports yours in that if most Imperial worlds have at least a healthy population growth then most worlds can and will provide for the tithe to support their local sectors. I also wasn't really getting into the individual war sectors and such because you can be certain that Generals within sectors will favour tithes from worlds that are known to produce quality; whilst being suspect of those that produce more basic rank and file troops.
And what generates quantity for this war that the IoM is fighting? Force and time.
Logistics (time) and production (force).
Confronted by a 32 % failrate at transportation leads to an focus on localisation of ressource production, and defense leading to a decentralised core force that is the PDF.
Leading to a matter of local sustainability ability and one can see that on how the departo munitorum is built.
Which then makes it a question of reproduction. 3% of the worlds in the IoM are hives. The rest? So no, recruiting the reproductivly more bottleknecking sex is actually a hinderance on a logical level as it always was. Unless we enter areas that become so grimdark that they ape reality.
NVM that population drops on planets that produce raw materials and food dropping output due to population would have devastating knock-on effects especially since the IoM will want to lower routes for transports of material due to potentially being able to calculate a jump without the need for a navigator which are another bottleknecking factor.
AldarionTelcontar wrote: Real-world standards apply up to the point where they explicitly do not apply.
If we use your measures, joke would be us attempting to discuss ANYTHING. Might as well shut down the background section of the site since, apparently, logic need not apply.
Hey, I'm not the one that picked the worst possible example. You chose to use the extremely silly killer planet populated by action heroes as your example, and I'm debating that choice.
But even if you had picked a world like Cadia, Tallarn, Mordian, or Armageddon, then you'd still be wrong because the Guard doesn't recruit based on standards that a modern army would use. The Guard recruits people who are human enough to hold a Lasgun.
There will be exceptions such as Vostroya where all firstborn sons must serve as punishment for their choice to remain neutral during the Horus Heresy but for everywhere else it's "Can you hold a gun? Congratulations, you are hired".
That's the Total War mentality of the Imperium. Size, shape, skin tone, or special body parts don't matter because the Guard cannot afford to turn away soldiers.
Total war mentality may lead to some females in the Imperial Guard, but the issues I had already noted before still mean that at least 95% of the Guard would be male.
Barring potential cultural factors (which would not develop in such a hostile galaxy), men are simply better recruits. Even PDF under full mobilization (10% - 25% of total planetary population, going by historical examples) would not field female regiments en masse.
Historically, societies that went for total war mobilization (West in the two world wars) punted men to the frontline and women to the factories.
And physical strength alone is not the only area where men are better than women. And if Catachan really is a Death World (and we know it is), then any notion of a "massively equal society" should have led to their extinction long time ago.
Again, it's a massively silly planet and the whole idea of it maintaining a pre-industrial population size has been discussed and debated many times as being very silly. The canon population of Catachan is half that of Bejing for crying out loud.
Nothing on that planet makes any sense whatsoever.
I know. But just because you have to throw some logic out doesn't mean you should throw ALL logic out.
Imperial logistics are a separate albeit related topic IMO. The true unreliability of warp travel in particular is highly debatable given the Imperium relies on regular and massive interstellar travel for its worlds to function on a regional and galactic scale. My personal thoughts are that warp travel is usually safe and predictable to fairly tight margins of error, but gets dramatically more dangerous if there are local inclement warp conditions (squalls and storms) or around major warzones (from the impact of death and violence on the warp). Clearly most ships reach their destinations in reasonable timeframes, and repeatedly do so for hundreds or even thousands of years in many cases (based on age of vessels).
Estimating the length of a Warp Jump, at least for the Imperium, is extremely difficult and inconsistent. As the Warp is ever-shifting, determining the length of a jump is difficult for even even semi-fluctuating passages. The Questio Logisticus branch of the Administratum is dedicated to this difficult task.[11]
One example is given for travel between the Hive World of Proxx and the Mining World of Hephastian. These planets are separated between dozens of light years and a standard voyage in the warp will take one to six weeks. However some voyages have been recorded as taking 1,200 years and another in as little as two minutes. 32% of the voyages have yet to reach their destination.
And that is not even going into communication.
I think this deserves its own thread.
Gonna have to dig out my 8th ed rulebook because that 32% claim on Lexicanum is wild if it is a general failure rate.
Gonna have to dig out my 8th ed rulebook because that 32% claim on Lexicanum is wild if it is a general failure rate.
Before i looked it up i assumed a failure rate of ca. 10% because 9/10 shipments of whatever arriving would be imo required to maintain hive and forgeworlds production output unless significant warehouses for stockpiling are a norm, something we never really saw f.e. in the hive spire cut we got.
Not Online!!! wrote: And what generates quantity for this war that the IoM is fighting? Force and time.
Logistics (time) and production (force).
Confronted by a 32 % failrate at transportation leads to an focus on localisation of ressource production, and defense leading to a decentralised core force that is the PDF.
Leading to a matter of local sustainability ability and one can see that on how the departo munitorum is built.
Which then makes it a question of reproduction. 3% of the worlds in the IoM are hives. The rest? So no, recruiting the reproductivly more bottleknecking sex is actually a hinderance on a logical level as it always was. Unless we enter areas that become so grimdark that they ape reality.
NVM that population drops on planets that produce raw materials and food dropping output due to population would have devastating knock-on effects especially since the IoM will want to lower routes for transports of material due to potentially being able to calculate a jump without the need for a navigator which are another bottleknecking factor.
The latest numbers of Hive Worlds sit between 10 and 25% of all Imperial worlds in Ubran Conquest from 2019, not 3% and the average population of those worlds sits at around half a trillion (taking a rough check of the worlds with known populations), with the particularly populated ones going much higher. For example, Vigilus had an estimated population of around one trillion six hundred seventy billion (that's 1.67 x 10 to the power of 12) people, prior to the War of Beasts and War of Nightmares of course.
If we take a nice round 5x10(11) people living on planet Gribble, and let's say that 1% serve in PDF (which I'm using, as 0.27% of the current population of Earth are employed in "similar" roles and it seems only fair given that the Imperium loves soldiers). That gives us 500 million PDF soldiers. If 10% of those go to the Guard, say twice a year then that's 1 million new Guardsmen for the meat grinder. That is 0.000002% of the population of Gribble.
Now, I don't know about you but as long as the birth rate on Gribble exceeds 0.000002% of the population yearly, I think they'll be fine. Even if there was a big drive to get more Regiments pumped out (which is unlikely if we're using those figures as that 0.000002% gives us almost as many soldiers from one planet that were deployed to the entire Armageddon sector), it would take years of intense recruitment for there to be any serious dent in the population of Gribble.
Now if the Imperium loses Gribble, then yeah there would be a problem but as of right now, Gribble is safe and sound, barring the crime, poor standard of living, sump monsters, mutants, cults, and probable radiation poisoning.
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AldarionTelcontar wrote: Total war mentality may lead to some females in the Imperial Guard, but the issues I had already noted before still mean that at least 95% of the Guard would be male.
Pulling percentages out of your rear doesn't make your point any more valid.
Barring potential cultural factors (which would not develop in such a hostile galaxy)
Absolute tosh. The Imperium has a massive variety of cultures because it is absolutely huge. One system could be ruled by an aristocratic caste modeled on the Renaissance French while one system over is ruled by tribal warlords.
That's the whole point of the universe being a sandbox, if you want to have your world only produce Regiments staffed by women then you can do that. If you want a world that was ravaged by calamity and women hold the protected position of mothers and leaders while the men are soldiers and workers, you can do that too. As long as you aren't causing hassle for real people then do as you want but don't tell people they can't if it isn't hurting anyone.
Historically, societies that went for total war mobilization (West in the two world wars) punted men to the frontline and women to the factories.
Do you mean like Britain where the population was extremely small so there wasn't a choice? Or Germany where there were massive cultural restrictions on women serving until poop hit the fan and the Red Army was knocking on the bunker doors?
The Imperium is not like the Western allies nor is it similar in its treatment of women to the Axis powers.
Will men be more likely to sign up? Maybe, we can't say for sure because the culture of the Imperium promotes service to the Emperor above all else.
I know. But just because you have to throw some logic out doesn't mean you should throw ALL logic out.
If you want to apply logic, don't pick the worst example possible. But even then your point is utter nonsense because none of the issues that we see with a modern armed force stuck with the limitations we have today in terms of genetics, population size, and technology exist in the 40k universe. Logic can be applied in very specific circumstances but using modern or even historical examples of militaries to prove your point is worthless because they are nothing alike.
Not Online!!! wrote: And what generates quantity for this war that the IoM is fighting? Force and time.
Logistics (time) and production (force).
Confronted by a 32 % failrate at transportation leads to an focus on localisation of ressource production, and defense leading to a decentralised core force that is the PDF.
Leading to a matter of local sustainability ability and one can see that on how the departo munitorum is built.
Which then makes it a question of reproduction. 3% of the worlds in the IoM are hives. The rest? So no, recruiting the reproductivly more bottleknecking sex is actually a hinderance on a logical level as it always was. Unless we enter areas that become so grimdark that they ape reality.
NVM that population drops on planets that produce raw materials and food dropping output due to population would have devastating knock-on effects especially since the IoM will want to lower routes for transports of material due to potentially being able to calculate a jump without the need for a navigator which are another bottleknecking factor.
The latest numbers of Hive Worlds sit between 10 and 25% of all Imperial worlds in Ubran Conquest from 2019, not 3% and the average population of those worlds sits at around half a trillion (taking a rough check of the worlds with known populations), with the particularly populated ones going much higher. For example, Vigilus had an estimated population of around one trillion six hundred seventy billion (that's 1.67 x 10 to the power of 12) people, prior to the War of Beasts and War of Nightmares of course.
If we take a nice round 5x10(11) people living on planet Gribble, and let's say that 1% serve in PDF (which I'm using, as 0.27% of the current population of Earth are employed in "similar" roles and it seems only fair given that the Imperium loves soldiers). That gives us 500 million PDF soldiers. If 10% of those go to the Guard, say twice a year then that's 1 million new Guardsmen for the meat grinder. That is 0.000002% of the population of Gribble.
Now, I don't know about you but as long as the birth rate on Gribble exceeds 0.000002% of the population yearly, I think they'll be fine. Even if there was a big drive to get more Regiments pumped out (which is unlikely if we're using those figures as that 0.000002% gives us almost as many soldiers from one planet that were deployed to the entire Armageddon sector), it would take years of intense recruitment for there to be any serious dent in the population of Gribble.
Now if the Imperium loses Gribble, then yeah there would be a problem but as of right now, Gribble is safe and sound, barring the crime, poor standard of living, sump monsters, mutants, cults, and probable radiation poisoning.
The problem is not hiveplanet grible but agriworld "binzen" supplying kelp for Food to gribble with a population of say 100 Mio people facing down the barrell of a chaos marine onslaught of the purge.
the soldiers in gribble only matter if the iom pushes back in an offensive but until that is under Way the PDF of binzen has to hold the line. Now assume that binzen loses 20% of it's population which is nothing considering the purges whole shtick is genocide through bio-chemical warfare. How do you maintain the productivity or achieve a rebound of population to increase productivity to pre invasion levels preferably without straining logistics and shipping of atleat 2 loads of replacement humans Off gribble.
Despite having raw numbers, the quantity of humans available to fight are clearly relatively limited - the Imperium had to strip forces from the Eastern Fringe to defend against the 13th Black Crusade for example (leaving the Tau free to mount their Fourth Sphere expansion), rather than just recruiting sufficient troops locally.
Lord Damocles wrote: Despite having raw numbers, the quantity of humans available to fight are clearly relatively limited - the Imperium had to strip forces from the Eastern Fringe to defend against the 13th Black Crusade for example (leaving the Tau free to mount their Fourth Sphere expansion), rather than just recruiting sufficient troops locally.
Tbf, that might be the result of bottle necks caused by lack of equipment, time to train, etc. There may theoretically have been plenty of able human bodies; just not sufficient time to get rifles in their hands or sufficient ships to transport everyone.
Lord Damocles wrote: Despite having raw numbers, the quantity of humans available to fight are clearly relatively limited - the Imperium had to strip forces from the Eastern Fringe to defend against the 13th Black Crusade for example (leaving the Tau free to mount their Fourth Sphere expansion), rather than just recruiting sufficient troops locally.
Tbf, that might be the result of bottle necks caused by lack of equipment, time to train, etc. There may theoretically have been plenty of able human bodies; just not sufficient time to get rifles in their hands or sufficient ships to transport everyone.
Plus even though we've talked about how the Tithe might not necessarily get the best of the best; they do at least get trained troops. Training takes time and a totally untrained and inexperienced army is more of a liability than an asset.
Another thing to consider is that the Imperium might not have wanted green tithe troops from worlds and wanted more experienced troops that had battle experience.
Not Online!!! wrote: The problem is not hiveplanet grible but agriworld "binzen" supplying kelp for Food to gribble with a population of say 100 Mio people facing down the barrell of a chaos marine onslaught of the purge.
the soldiers in gribble only matter if the iom pushes back in an offensive but until that is under Way the PDF of binzen has to hold the line. Now assume that binzen loses 20% of it's population which is nothing considering the purges whole shtick is genocide through bio-chemical warfare. How do you maintain the productivity or achieve a rebound of population to increase productivity to pre invasion levels preferably without straining logistics and shipping of atleat 2 loads of replacement humans Off gribble.
Yeah, if the Agriworld goes pop then other planets will suffer. Even if the world isn't taken the output will be greatly reduced.
But I'm going to let you in on a little secret, the Imperium doesn't really give a tinkers fig if 100 million people die of starvation on Gribble because more will come along later when the problems at Binzen get fixed, probably by taking people off of Gribble and moving them over to Binzen once the war is over. It won't take a few days but that's not how an interstellar empire works with regard to timescales. In ten years Binzen will be fixed, starvation will ease on Gribble and things will be back to normal. In those ten years, if Gribble can't produce its tithe then the Governor gets shot and a new Governor who will get the tithe sorted is installed. The chances of every single Regiment raised on Gribble prior to and during the invasion of Binzen all getting completely destroyed is unlikely so the troop numbers for the immediate threat aren't an issue.
Plus if Gribble is starting to starve, then the authorities can round up a couple of million people and send them off to fight or turn them into Corpse Starch.
Despite the mess that is the Administratum, the Imperium gets things moving because it has the population density and production capacity to do so. It's like late-game Stellaris where the only way to defeat a powerful empire is to atomise their planets. Unless you destroy the core worlds, they will bounce back.
Lord Damocles wrote: Despite having raw numbers, the quantity of humans available to fight are clearly relatively limited - the Imperium had to strip forces from the Eastern Fringe to defend against the 13th Black Crusade for example (leaving the Tau free to mount their Fourth Sphere expansion), rather than just recruiting sufficient troops locally.
While I agree that humans are a finite reserve, using the end of M41 is a bit unfair. The largest number of major wars fought by the Imperium for hundreds if not thousands of years with little time to recover in between. Three Tyrannic Wars all within a hundred-year span is the kicker IMO.
What numbers are you using for Armageddon subsector?
Helsreach and the Armageddon Codex I would assume. Armageddon has always been a very cool but very cursed warzone though and it's been long known that the numbers are very very iffy for a supposedly sub-sector scale war.
Not Online!!! wrote: The problem is not hiveplanet grible but agriworld "binzen" supplying kelp for Food to gribble with a population of say 100 Mio people facing down the barrell of a chaos marine onslaught of the purge.
the soldiers in gribble only matter if the iom pushes back in an offensive but until that is under Way the PDF of binzen has to hold the line. Now assume that binzen loses 20% of it's population which is nothing considering the purges whole shtick is genocide through bio-chemical warfare. How do you maintain the productivity or achieve a rebound of population to increase productivity to pre invasion levels preferably without straining logistics and shipping of atleat 2 loads of replacement humans Off gribble.
Yeah, if the Agriworld goes pop then other planets will suffer. Even if the world isn't taken the output will be greatly reduced.
But I'm going to let you in on a little secret, the Imperium doesn't really give a tinkers fig if 100 million people die of starvation on Gribble because more will come along later when the problems at Binzen get fixed, probably by taking people off of Gribble and moving them over to Binzen once the war is over. It won't take a few days but that's not how an interstellar empire works with regard to timescales. In ten years Binzen will be fixed, starvation will ease on Gribble and things will be back to normal. In those ten years, if Gribble can't produce its tithe then the Governor gets shot and a new Governor who will get the tithe sorted is installed. The chances of every single Regiment raised on Gribble prior to and during the invasion of Binzen all getting completely destroyed is unlikely so the troop numbers for the immediate threat aren't an issue.
Plus if Gribble is starting to starve, then the authorities can round up a couple of million people and send them off to fight or turn them into Corpse Starch.
Despite the mess that is the Administratum, the Imperium gets things moving because it has the population density and production capacity to do so. It's like late-game Stellaris where the only way to defeat a powerful empire is to atomise their planets. Unless you destroy the core worlds, they will bounce back.
I find blockade and targeted destruction of food and or minerals/ pops far more effective but that is MP vs SP. (and let's be honest stellaris AI is about the same as TW AI)
But aside this, you see 100 mio die on Gribble because of starvation, starvation though creates unrest, unrest causes sedition and rebellion. And that is with Binzen still producing at lowered capacity but still doing it's job and it will do it better sooner if population can replenish which is why female regiments will be a rarity on the PDF level already unless recruited specifically from hives with overpopulation problems. But what if Binzen suddendly dies, collapses rebells, etc? It's the same point with vraks, which provoked such an immense reaction because it was a waypoint and arsenal for movement of the army and or facilitating recruitment and that was a glorified weapons cache in the great sheme of things.
Not Online!!! wrote: But aside this, you see 100 mio die on Gribble because of starvation, starvation though creates unrest, unrest causes sedition and rebellion. And that is with Binzen still producing at lowered capacity but still doing it's job and it will do it better sooner if population can replenish which is why female regiments will be a rarity on the PDF level already unless recruited specifically from hives with overpopulation problems. But what if Binzen suddendly dies, collapses rebells, etc? It's the same point with vraks, which provoked such an immense reaction because it was a waypoint and arsenal for movement of the army and or facilitating recruitment and that was a glorified weapons cache in the great sheme of things.
Again, these are all very specific "worst case" scenarios though and while things aren't exactly peachy in Ye Olde Imperium, the majority of worlds haven't just exploded into open warfare.
We're talking about normal recruiting, not "By the Emperor, the breadbasket for five systems has just been atomised and our planets are in open revolt".
Not Online!!! wrote: But aside this, you see 100 mio die on Gribble because of starvation, starvation though creates unrest, unrest causes sedition and rebellion. And that is with Binzen still producing at lowered capacity but still doing it's job and it will do it better sooner if population can replenish which is why female regiments will be a rarity on the PDF level already unless recruited specifically from hives with overpopulation problems. But what if Binzen suddendly dies, collapses rebells, etc? It's the same point with vraks, which provoked such an immense reaction because it was a waypoint and arsenal for movement of the army and or facilitating recruitment and that was a glorified weapons cache in the great sheme of things.
Again, these are all very specific "worst case" scenarios though and while things aren't exactly peachy in Ye Olde Imperium, the majority of worlds haven't just exploded into open warfare.
We're talking about normal recruiting, not "By the Emperor, the breadbasket for five systems has just been atomised and our planets are in open revolt".
no. We are not talking about worst case. About 3.5 % of any given population going into the streets can topple a government not even violence normaly apearing when hunger becomes an issue. The leeway the IoM has is far smaller than many people assume, it's the same with our own states.
Er, GW have been very consistent over the editions that the Imperium controls about a million worlds scattered across the galaxy. Not billions.
NVM that there are about estimated 300'000'000 in our galaxy. A "inhabitable" world is pretty rare in itself.
Well, some of the Imperial worlds are terraformed, and some of them are not strictly habitable (being orbital installations or little more than moon bases).
Not Online!!! wrote: no. We are not talking about worst case. About 3.5 % of any given population going into the streets can topple a government not even violence normaly apearing when hunger becomes an issue. The leeway the IoM has is far smaller than many people assume, it's the same with our own states.
And it's all entirely irrelevant to the points being discussed.
Not Online!!! wrote: no. We are not talking about worst case. About 3.5 % of any given population going into the streets can topple a government not even violence normaly apearing when hunger becomes an issue. The leeway the IoM has is far smaller than many people assume, it's the same with our own states.
And it's all entirely irrelevant to the points being discussed.
No. You want to deem it irrelevant because it doesn't fit what you want. But the setting without logistical constraints would, even if the 8th edition 32% are nuts, be less grimdark and only a matter of time until the IoM would win by sheer snowballing inertia.
But the fact remains that Logistics don't work out in favour of female regiments at all (unless we are talking about garison worlds and even there arguably deployment of female regiments into warzones would be questionable) on a fundamental level onwards in a setting with 32% failurerate of shipping and with massive population centers requiring food production from offworld / out of system planets. And we see the IoM's reaction an somewhat semi relevant world like vraks that it takes logistics very seriously.
Your point is only relevant if the Imperium wasn't absolutely massive and had a hundred ways to artificially increase populations when needed.
The losses from Warp travel are baked into calculations of the Tithe and raising of Regiments, they aren't just something that happens willy nilly that the Imperium gets a massive shock by every time it happens.
It is hard-coded into the calculations made by the Administratum at all times.
You're clutching at straws to justify a position that is completely at odds with what the actual setting is telling you. There are women in the Guard, just like there are women in the Titan Legions, Mechanicus, Knight Lances, Navy, Inquisition, Assassinorum, Arbites, and the various local forces.
You can dress it up as "logic" or "maths" or whatever you want but it's utter tosh and it's been proven time and time again that is the case.
Not Online!!! wrote: ...even if the 8th edition 32% are nuts, be less grimdark and only a matter of time until the IoM would win by sheer snowballing inertia...
...a setting with 32% failurerate of shipping ...
See other thread. This is a single example, probably not generalisable (in my opinion), and the correct rate in the source is 22% (still massive). I have edited Lexicanum to the correct value.
Also, a stupidly high loss rate for basic trade isn't needed to be grimdark.
Gert wrote: Your point is only relevant if the Imperium wasn't absolutely massive and had a hundred ways to artificially increase populations when needed.
it's size is preciscly the problem in combination with unreliable transportation,
The losses from Warp travel are baked into calculations of the Tithe and raising of Regiments, they aren't just something that happens willy nilly that the Imperium gets a massive shock by every time it happens. It is hard-coded into the calculations made by the Administratum at all times.
An administratum shown to be out of date on occaision by centuries, inefficent and full of nepotism. NVM that standard loses of warptravel can be calculated else the whole tihng would collapse but info about the state of production happening "planetside" can not adequatly due to above.
You're clutching at straws to justify a position that is completely at odds with what the actual setting is telling you. There are women in the Guard, just like there are women in the Titan Legions, Mechanicus, Knight Lances, Navy, Inquisition, Assassinorum, Arbites, and the various local forces.
You can dress it up as "logic" or "maths" or whatever you want but it's utter tosh and it's been proven time and time again that is the case.
My position has never been that there are no female guard regiments as verifyable in this thread. Contrary my position was that the IoM would in general avoid conscription of women for combat duty due to concerns of maintenance of ressource output through population due to a questionable state of automatisation and a reliance on manpower in production that is localised.
And yet the setting says otherwise when it beats you around the head with how brutal and cruel the Imperium is.
Women being kept to allow for reproduction isn't an issue when a tiny tiny tiny portion of the population is being sent to fight.
This isn't like the World Wars where sending troops to fight means losing entire generations. A planet only raises Regiments when it can sustain them.
Even if half of the 0.00002% of the population that gets drafted are women, the impact on the overall population is utterly negligible.
Not every woman in the Imperium is reproducing at every opportunity because that would be monumentally messed up if that was the baseline for the background. But it isn't so women going off to join the Guard isn't an issue.
Haighus wrote: Whilst I agree with your overall point, the only canon number I have ever come across for hive worlds lists approximately 32,000 out of the rough 1,000,000 worlds of the Imperium. About 3%. Still a vast population base though.
For the record, I don't think this would include planets like Verghast, where the biggest hive is barely more populous than modern Tokyo.
Urban Conquest from 2019 used that figure, though it also caveats that with the whole "The Imperium doesn't really know for sure" but as we agree, the wider point stands.
Verghast is listed as a Hive World but as with all things, there can be those that hit below the average. Vervunhive never really came across as particularly large as far as Hive cities go while Ferrazoica and Vannick were said to be smaller than their larger sibling. Verghast didn't seem to be quite as colonised as other Hive Worlds as well, likely due to the fact that they were in the Sabbat Worlds, and with a huge Chaos empire on their doorstep, the Imperium was likely a bit cautious of sending billions of people to a planet where they could very likely end up as soldiers or slaves of Chaos.
Thanks, I'd not read Urban Conquest before. I think the two are reconcilable through differing definitions- you can see how a definition including Verghast (a world that probably has noticeably less population than modern-day Earth) is going to come up with a greatly different number to the 3rd edition classification of >100 billion.
Gert wrote: And yet the setting says otherwise when it beats you around the head with how brutal and cruel the Imperium is.
Women being kept to allow for reproduction isn't an issue when a tiny tiny tiny portion of the population is being sent to fight.
Applies once again only to two types of worlds, garrison worlds and hives which both rely on non garrison and hive planets for mere existence in some cases and can hardly be considered self sufficent. So no, it doesn't beat me on the head. We have never gotten numbers either for regimental makeup either.
This isn't like the World Wars where sending troops to fight means losing entire generations. A planet only raises Regiments when it can sustain them.
Even if half of the 0.00002% of the population that gets drafted are women, the impact on the overall population is utterly negligible.
overall, yes, local no. And that is the issue i point to.
Not every woman in the Imperium is reproducing at every opportunity because that would be monumentally messed up if that was the baseline for the background. But it isn't so women going off to join the Guard isn't an issue.
Also not the point raised. When you are done shifting straw tell me.
AldarionTelcontar wrote: Total war mentality may lead to some females in the Imperial Guard, but the issues I had already noted before still mean that at least 95% of the Guard would be male.
Pulling percentages out of your rear doesn't make your point any more valid.
44% of women fail AFCT compared to 7% of men. And this is for real-world militaries, which are basically equivalent to PDF, if that. In the Imperial Guard, disbalance would be even greater.
Barring potential cultural factors (which would not develop in such a hostile galaxy)
Absolute tosh. The Imperium has a massive variety of cultures because it is absolutely huge. One system could be ruled by an aristocratic caste modeled on the Renaissance French while one system over is ruled by tribal warlords.
That's the whole point of the universe being a sandbox, if you want to have your world only produce Regiments staffed by women then you can do that. If you want a world that was ravaged by calamity and women hold the protected position of mothers and leaders while the men are soldiers and workers, you can do that too. As long as you aren't causing hassle for real people then do as you want but don't tell people they can't if it isn't hurting anyone.
Stop strawmaning. I have already said that I have no issue with occasional world having women serve in the army - hell, if you want a world where ONLY women serve in the army, go for it! So long as the explanation for why at least tries to make sense.
But biological and other realities mean that such worlds will be absolute rarity, which means that any Imperium-wide force WILL be massive majority male.
Let me remind you what the OP actually asked:
Is there any particular reason why we don't see female-majority regiments in books more often? Or women in combat roles in fiction in general, despite the setting clearly encouraging all genders to take up arms?
Reason is what I have explained above. We don't SEE such regiments in books more often because authors that write for 40k base their books on real-life militaries. And real-life militaries don't have female-majority regiments, or even all that many women, in frontline service, because doing so would simply be a bad idea.
In fact, "cultural factors" throwing practicality out of the window are the only way to HAVE large numbers of women in service.
Historically, societies that went for total war mobilization (West in the two world wars) punted men to the frontline and women to the factories.
Do you mean like Britain where the population was extremely small so there wasn't a choice? Or Germany where there were massive cultural restrictions on women serving until poop hit the fan and the Red Army was knocking on the bunker doors?
The Imperium is not like the Western allies nor is it similar in its treatment of women to the Axis powers.
Will men be more likely to sign up? Maybe, we can't say for sure because the culture of the Imperium promotes service to the Emperor above all else.
I mean, ALL historical societies where there was no ideological pressure to do otherwise.
Also, LOL at Britain having "extremely small" population. In 1939, United Kingdom alone had 48 million people. United States at the same time had 130 million, little less than three times the British population. And UK also had Commonwealth as well as the colonies.
I know. But just because you have to throw some logic out doesn't mean you should throw ALL logic out.
If you want to apply logic, don't pick the worst example possible. But even then your point is utter nonsense because none of the issues that we see with a modern armed force stuck with the limitations we have today in terms of genetics, population size, and technology exist in the 40k universe. Logic can be applied in very specific circumstances but using modern or even historical examples of militaries to prove your point is worthless because they are nothing alike.
Except Imperium IS stuck with the limitations in terms of genetics and technology. Genetic treatment is expensive, cybernetics as well, and while some worlds of the Imperium have excess population, there are also others which have quite the opposite problem.
If genetic treatment was so easy, every single Imperial Guard soldier would be a SPARTAN II equivalent.
You may get occasional world which would field primarily-female or all-female regiments - for example, if men are required for manual labor (e.g. coal mining world) - but such will be rarity.
The Imperium is stagnant. Not regressive. The technology is does understand is churned in staggering volumes (such as Las Weapons, the understanding of which is such the Imperium can readily scale it up and down, depending on need)
The Cain novels (the main IG ones I’ve read) again make it clear that bionics are far from uncommon. Legs, arms, fingers, lungs, other organs are readily enough available, indeed you just need to survive long enough for them to be installed. And we see them being installed on and into Privates (not Rude Bits, Privates).
You again seem obsessed with physical strength. Whilst handy for fist fights, it just factor when you’re talking about the Imperial Guard, because they’re not a force designed around close range combat.
A Sentinel Pilot or tank crew doesn’t need to be beefcake rippling with well oiled muscles. A line trooper just needs to be able to tell one end of their Lasgun from the other, and shoot reasonably straight.
Your scouts need to be stealthy and enduring. But everyone else tends to fight from relatively static positions, relying on APCs to cart them about where suitable, or only have enough endurance to complete a march or redeployment without needing a Nice Bit Sit Down.
Feed them a high protein diet (hi Solyen Viridians!) and keep them well exercised, and the men and women under your command will perform quite competently.
We also live indolent lives the like most Imperial Citizens can only dream of. Not for us the eternal drudgery of living in a Hive. Not for us the honest physical toil of an Agri-World. Harsh environments breed resilient humans. Apply that selective pressure across 10,000 years, and what’s that going to do to baseline strength and toughness of the populace? That’s right, it’s naturally going to preserve the strongest and toughest members, as those not physically capable don’t breed as often or possibly at all.
Put steroids and growth hormones in the general water supply, and what’s that gonna do? Increase muscle mass. Making for a stronger population better able to carry out manual labour.
And again? You only need your Guard Soldiers to be strong and fit enough to carry their gear and fight effectively. That’s it. And if you argue women are inherently weak? Go Google “Rhea Ripley Back Muscles”. Whilst a genuinely exceptional woman, go back to my comment above about the different selective pressures 10,000+ years on an Imperial World, and how’ll they’ll shift the baseline norm.
The figures you shared are also barely relevant. Because there, you’re talking Optional Recruitment. Not Conscription. When you’re conscripting? You have a lower threshold because it’s the body count you’re after, not some (ultimately arbitrary) physical benchmark.
Now, not all Imperial worlds practice conscription or press ganging, but it’s far from unheard of.
While I don't doubt that the Imperium has technologies that could compensate for the inherent biological combat superiority of human males, I also suspect that such techniques are going to be viewed as not worth the effort. Why use strength enhancing technology to bring about some minor parity between the sexes when you could just make your mostly male soldiers even stronger?
Or just totally ignore the sex of your recruits and take what the local worlds give you, which going by all historical trends and cultural practices would be mostly male. The Imperium at its upper levels does not care about equality or sexism, only results matter. If a particular world has a female dominated society because of whatever arbitrary reason you set forth then the Imperium will accept female guardsmen from that planet. Though perhaps a pencil pusher somewhere might eventually take issue with potential combat shortcomings of such regiments, like noting their slower maneuvering times and greater than typical amounts of stress injuries from the weight of their equipment. He might even be notably confused as to why such things are happening, after all the sex of soldiers will likely be filtered out as irrelevant data at lower levels because they've never really had this as an issue.
You again seem obsessed with physical strength. Whilst handy for fist fights, it just factor when you’re talking about the Imperial Guard, because they’re not a force designed around close range combat.
A Sentinel Pilot or tank crew doesn’t need to be beefcake rippling with well oiled muscles. A line trooper just needs to be able to tell one end of their Lasgun from the other, and shoot reasonably straight.
You seem to be discounting what strength actually means in combat. Its not just how much you can bench press. It's all the soft factors that come from that, and other things that having the better baseline strength of male bodies gives you.
As a whole, male soldiers will be better equipped to sustain the long term effects of carrying around their gear. The Imperium is not going to make the gear of female soldiers lighter to compensate, so overall they're going to be carrying a heavier load relative to their body size. This means they'll suffer more stress injuries over time.
In terms of walking long distances and marching, men and women have different gaits and stride anatomy. Men have a superior form for walking or running long distances, women do not due to having to give birth. This is a small difference, but small differences build up. Can specific individual women beat specific individual men in terms of strength or agility? Yes. But overall those trends show a distinct biological advantage to male bodies. Rhea Ripley, or indeed any unusually strong women, is not an argument against the biological difference between men and women. If you get to use outlier examples, then I get to bring forth The Rock and Hafþór Björnsson.
This is why men and womens sports are separated, its not a fair competition. And its a underlying reason why historically men make up most soldiers/warriors/etc... And the Imperium is no different, and with its brutal pragmatism it'll only care about results.
The figures you shared are also barely relevant. Because there, you’re talking Optional Recruitment. Not Conscription. When you’re conscripting? You have a lower threshold because it’s the body count you’re after, not some (ultimately arbitrary) physical benchmark.
Now, not all Imperial worlds practice conscription or press ganging, but it’s far from unheard of.
Conscription just means you are forcing people to serve. It doesn't automatically mean you are lowering your standards. There is a reason why when you get drafted the first thing that happens is a physical. If you fail that you get sent home.
Given the absolutely massive population that the Imperium can draw upon, I would say that in normal circumstances they can afford to be picky. It'll only be on worlds where there is a truly desperate situation happening that they'll lower their standards.
You seem to be discounting what strength actually means in combat. Its not just how much you can bench press. It's all the soft factors that come from that, and other things that having the better baseline strength of male bodies gives you.
As a whole, male soldiers will be better equipped to sustain the long term effects of carrying around their gear. The Imperium is not going to make the gear of female soldiers lighter to compensate, so overall they're going to be carrying a heavier load relative to their body size. This means they'll suffer more stress injuries over time.
In terms of walking long distances and marching, men and women have different gaits and stride anatomy. Men have a superior form for walking or running long distances, women do not due to having to give birth. This is a small difference, but small differences build up. Can specific individual women beat specific individual men in terms of strength or agility? Yes. But overall those trends show a distinct biological advantage to male bodies. Rhea Ripley, or indeed any unusually strong women, is not an argument against the biological difference between men and women. If you get to use outlier examples, then I get to bring forth The Rock and Hafþór Björnsson.
This is why men and womens sports are separated, its not a fair competition. And its a underlying reason why historically men make up most soldiers/warriors/etc... And the Imperium is no different, and with its brutal pragmatism it'll only care about results.
I feel like you're disregarding a few points Mad Doc already made though. As they pointed out, plenty of women (especially in the 41st millenium) have enough physical strength to carry their kit around without having to worry about injury. Or at least, without having to worry about injury significantly moreso than their male counterparts.
Marching efficiency probably isn't a huge factor for most regiments because you're probably being carried by transport when going long distances.
Basically, if someone in the imperium is looking closely enough at individual performance to care about the physics of a soldier's stride, they're probably also looking carefully enough to see that a given soldier is strong enough for the guard's purposes. And if they really want to maximize stride efficiency or whatever, then you could be looking at segragated regiments or squads or whatever. Which would sort of support the idea of all-female groups of guard.
And if they aren't looking closely enough at those nuances, well, you'll get plenty of perfectly capable women in the 41st millenium who can march and shoot well enough for the guard to be happy to have them.
Seems like it would take a pretty specific level of scrutiny/recruitment optimization to make sex a deterrent for recruitment. You have to be looking close enough to care, but you also can't care enough to adjust kits, segragate squads, assign the women to tank units, etc.
Also, we've seen that there are plenty of perfectly competent and respected women in the guard. Like, that's just canon at this point. If a planet is going out of its way to *not* tithe women given how many woman we see swinging power swords and barking orders in the 41st millenium, that feels like more of a quirk of that planet at this point.
Not every woman in the Imperium is reproducing at every opportunity because that would be monumentally messed up if that was the baseline for the background. But it isn't so women going off to join the Guard isn't an issue.
Honestly whilst the Imperium is pretty horrific, its actually got some very strong equal gender rights. Or if not actual rights, then there are least very limited to no gender based barriers at large.
Of course once you get to specific worlds and groups you can see disparity - such as Escher gangs or even potential feudal worlds which might have a more traditional "male dominated" social structure.
You seem to be discounting what strength actually means in combat. Its not just how much you can bench press. It's all the soft factors that come from that, and other things that having the better baseline strength of male bodies gives you.
As a whole, male soldiers will be better equipped to sustain the long term effects of carrying around their gear. The Imperium is not going to make the gear of female soldiers lighter to compensate, so overall they're going to be carrying a heavier load relative to their body size. This means they'll suffer more stress injuries over time.
In terms of walking long distances and marching, men and women have different gaits and stride anatomy. Men have a superior form for walking or running long distances, women do not due to having to give birth. This is a small difference, but small differences build up. Can specific individual women beat specific individual men in terms of strength or agility? Yes. But overall those trends show a distinct biological advantage to male bodies. Rhea Ripley, or indeed any unusually strong women, is not an argument against the biological difference between men and women. If you get to use outlier examples, then I get to bring forth The Rock and Hafþór Björnsson.
This is why men and womens sports are separated, its not a fair competition. And its a underlying reason why historically men make up most soldiers/warriors/etc... And the Imperium is no different, and with its brutal pragmatism it'll only care about results.
I feel like you're disregarding a few points Mad Doc already made though. As they pointed out, plenty of women (especially in the 41st millenium) have enough physical strength to carry their kit around without having to worry about injury. Or at least, without having to worry about injury significantly moreso than their male counterparts.
You are suggesting that humans have evolved away our sexual dimorphism by the time of 40k. Given the artwork I would say you need to cite sources that humanity has lost that, otherwise we must assume it is the same as in the modern day.
There is no reason to believe that these facts have changed in the 41st millenium. Women are more likely to injure themselves in military training compared to men, a fact which only goes away when you account for relative fitness. This suggests that women overall are less fit by default compared to men, which leads to the higher injury rates.
Yes, a women can improve her fitness to compensate and reduce injury risk. But this is still something that requires a deviation from the norm.
Not every woman in the Imperium is reproducing at every opportunity because that would be monumentally messed up if that was the baseline for the background. But it isn't so women going off to join the Guard isn't an issue.
Honestly whilst the Imperium is pretty horrific, its actually got some very strong equal gender rights. Or if not actual rights, then there are least very limited to no gender based barriers at large.
Of course once you get to specific worlds and groups you can see disparity - such as Escher gangs or even potential feudal worlds which might have a more traditional "male dominated" social structure.
Correct. The Imperium won't discriminate because someone is a women, or a man, or whatever(as long as whatever isn't a filthy xeno or mutant).
But the Imperium will discriminate based on tangible effects, and you better believe they're not going to change their standards because potential recruits are women. Female guard recruits will need to pass the same requirements as the men, and if you are found wanting they're not going to give you a pass because you're a women.
This will naturally result in fewer women compared to men overall in the IG. Can there be exceptions with all female guard regiments? Might there be some regiments that have strict 50/50 mixtures? Absolutely, but its not going to be the norm.
For what its worth, in the novels I have read there always seems to be a few female characters in various Imperial guard regiments and nobody seems to comment on it being unusual. It certainly seems to be at least similar to what the modern US military has, so some but definitely in the minority.
I mean, it seems that the requirements for Guard service are:
1 - Are you breathing? (optional)
2 - Do you have the appropriate amount of limbs? (optional)
3 - Are you excited to kill the Xenos, the Mutant, and the Heretic? (required)
The Guard seems pretty loose about its standards considering Regiments like the Salvar Chem Dogs (who are all criminals) or the Jopall Indentured Squadrons (who are all born in debt to their lords and join up as a way of paying that life debt) exist.
And there’s still no allowance made that few, if any, worlds in the Imperium are much like our own.
As I said, in the real world, certainly in the west? We live pretty easy lives. I do office work, so don’t exactly do heavy lifting day to day. And our culture has traditionally kept women out of physical labour roles, seemingly because They Are Delicate Flowers.
40K? Hive Worlds, Agri-Worlds, Industrial Worlds all have physically intensive jobs, even if it’s just repetitive movement. That affects your overall fitness. Rinse and repeat over 10,000+ years and however many generations, and who knows what the average strength of each sex will look like, let alone on which exact planet.
Thus the counter argument simply falls away, because it’s solely rooted in our world, and makes no allowance for varied gravity, a life of physical labour, and untold generations who’ve developed in those much harsher conditions than we’re used to.
We could also consider things that GW often doesn't focus on such as varied air quality and gravity levels and the impacts those might have on multiple generations.
Even without considering that the Imperium clearly does a lot of genetic and mechanical alterations. 40K was birthed in an era where some fantasy/scifi did lean into the whole "the worse the environment the tougher people would evolve/grow to overcome it. Similar to how in Dune the Fremen and the Emperor's elite guard are shown to both be super-human warriors in their own settings; purely because they live in such harsh environments.
Plus there's every change that even if natural selection hasn't had time/allowed for it; that there's been tinkering here and there in so many genepools that the people are built very differently to how we are today.
We might even infer that people are more durable when we consider the absolute insane toxic hell that people in, say, Necromunda live in every day, and yet they appear to be able to survive, thrive and fight in such an environment. Whilst in reality chances are you'd be coughing up your lungs and dead pretty fast in such an environment.
Maybe 40k women are really as strong as men on average; but if that's the case, it's odd that most of the models don't seem to show them being as muscular.
The female chaos cultists are obviously slighter than their absolutely jacked male counterparts, for example.
Lord Damocles wrote: Maybe 40k women are really as strong as men on average; but if that's the case, it's odd that most of the models don't seem to show them being as muscular.
The female chaos cultists are obviously slighter than their absolutely jacked male counterparts, for example.
They don't have to be as strong as men though. If we assume that things like weight and such are constants, then if the base line physical performance of men and women both increases over time from present day to 40K's era. Then it could be that whilst women are not equal to men; they are still much stronger than women are today. Thus able to perform on the battlefield to a high level of performance.
Thus the counter argument simply falls away, because it’s solely rooted in our world, and makes no allowance for varied gravity, a life of physical labour, and untold generations who’ve developed in those much harsher conditions than we’re used to.
This a BS argument.
You go measure the average strength and fitness of men and women in 3rd world countries where everybody is living in conditions more close to what you are describing, and you'll still find that there is still a physical difference between men and women. Heck, go back in time to any pre-industrial society and you'll find the same. You'll find that armies at the time were, shockingly, mostly men. If anything, harsher conditions amplify gender roles in societies.
Is life on many worlds harsh? Yes. Is it harsher than what humanity has survived in the past on our own planet? Not really. Not going by how people are drawn in the artwork.
Is living in the belly of a hive hard? Yeah. But is scrounging for rats and scraps in a metal cave harder than hunting and gathering on the Siberian Steppe? No, its actually probably easier because at least its not freezing cold.
Thus the counter argument simply falls away, because it’s solely rooted in our world, and makes no allowance for varied gravity, a life of physical labour, and untold generations who’ve developed in those much harsher conditions than we’re used to.
This a BS argument.
You go measure the average strength and fitness of men and women in 3rd world countries where everybody is living in conditions more close to what you are describing, and you'll still find that there is still a physical difference between men and women. Heck, go back in time to any pre-industrial society and you'll find the same. You'll find that armies at the time were, shockingly, mostly men. If anything, harsher conditions amplify gender roles in societies.
.
As I noted in my post on this, 40K was birthed in the same era as Dune and other sci-fi where harsher living conditions was shown to result in stronger people than those living in easier/softer conditions. Yes this is NOT how it works in our reality where harsher conditions do not make you any stronger and will, if anything, increase your chance of sickness/injury. However its something that is clearly present in things like 40K and Dune.
Of course its also got its limit points and there most certainly are many in 40K who are weak, sick, injured, crippled and such who are of no use to the Imperium save as Corpse Starch*
*allegedly, since we all know that Corpse Starch isn't really made of bodies.....
Lord Damocles wrote: Maybe 40k women are really as strong as men on average; but if that's the case, it's odd that most of the models don't seem to show them being as muscular.
The female chaos cultists are obviously slighter than their absolutely jacked male counterparts, for example.
They don't have to be as strong as men though. If we assume that things like weight and such are constants, then if the base line physical performance of men and women both increases over time from present day to 40K's era. Then it could be that whilst women are not equal to men; they are still much stronger than women are today. Thus able to perform on the battlefield to a high level of performance.
Such changes would only result in the standards rising, so we'd still be in the same rough pattern as today. Women allowed into the IG, but still having to meet the same requirements and between that and the natural state of human society being for men to go to war over women results in fewer women overall in the IG.
And if humans have become stronger, it stands to reason that everything will have gotten heavier to match. You're carrying more body armor and gear because you can carry more.
I can see the AM wanting mixed regiments just on the basis that conquered worlds often keep their AM regiments in place, both to garrison the world as well as repopulate it.
Yes but at some point it starts levelling out. Even real world armies only maintain a certain level of physical fitness, despite the fact that both genders can achieve more and could thus carry more armour and be fitter than they are.
My point is that the bar has a point where once you go above it the gains become less and less great, esp for an army like the Guard which is equipment limited by doctrine. Yes you CAN make better armour - you can make Space Marine grade armour. However the Imperium does not because of its established structure of "how things are gone".
So if the physical body for healthy (or moderately healthy) imperial citizens in the 40K setting is basically at or above the standard bar for men and women then it doesn't matter if peak performance can be greater; they are already above the bar to perform to the required standard.
Again don't forget the Imperial recruiting is closer to when armed forces used Press Gangs to just force drunk men in bars into life in the Navy. Or in WW2 Stalingrad when troops were sent into battle without guns with the expectation that they'd pick up those of their fallen comrades. The Imperium does at least give you a gun.
It's "by the book" madness when the book was written thousands of years ago and some of the pages are probably missing.
We have to remember that they aren't building a modern army to modern standards. It's basically older style army building with the main change being a lack of any gender restrictions.
Overread wrote: Again don't forget the Imperial recruiting is closer to when armed forces used Press Gangs to just force drunk men in bars into life in the Navy. Or in WW2 Stalingrad when troops were sent into battle without guns with the expectation that they'd pick up those of their fallen comrades.
That's a gross over generalisation when you have worlds like Vostroya which are very invested in the quality of their military exports.
Given that we know what a basic conscript is represented by in tabletop terms, we know that a standard Guardsman/woman is better than that in most cases.
I would argue that the Guard doesn't have standardised recruitment practices, at least not Imperium wide.
Or if there is a standard, its going to be a damn low bar to pass seeing as how varied the people's of the Imperium are.
Overread wrote: Again don't forget the Imperial recruiting is closer to when armed forces used Press Gangs to just force drunk men in bars into life in the Navy. Or in WW2 Stalingrad when troops were sent into battle without guns with the expectation that they'd pick up those of their fallen comrades.
That's a gross over generalisation when you have worlds like Vostroya which are very invested in the quality of their military exports.
Given that we know what a basic conscript is represented by in tabletop terms, we know that a standard Guardsman/woman is better than that in most cases.
True and like a lot of things 40K its sometimes hard to give a generalisation at times because you can always pick worlds and examples that go against any generalisation. Because when you've 1million worlds spread out over a Galaxy the potential for variety is insanely fast.
My view is more of a very general oversight of it all. Within that you will get worlds that don't care one bit about any standard and will use the Tithe to get rid of undesirables; through to worlds that will take it very seriously and produce extremely top-end troops through to worlds that use genetic cloning (illegally) to produce whole tithes. etc....
We even see this in the lore in some stories where there's competition and contrast between different regiments, showing some better trained than others and such. The game side of things does tend to lean heavily into the more quality side and I think that's partly to help highlight the contrast between the organised Imperial armies and the rabble of Chaos cultists and followers.
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Gert wrote: I would argue that the Guard doesn't have standardised recruitment practices, at least not Imperium wide.
Or if there is a standard, its going to be a damn low bar to pass seeing as how varied the people's of the Imperium are.
Lord Damocles wrote: Maybe 40k women are really as strong as men on average; but if that's the case, it's odd that most of the models don't seem to show them being as muscular.
The female chaos cultists are obviously slighter than their absolutely jacked male counterparts, for example.
They don't have to be as strong as men though. If we assume that things like weight and such are constants, then if the base line physical performance of men and women both increases over time from present day to 40K's era. Then it could be that whilst women are not equal to men; they are still much stronger than women are today. Thus able to perform on the battlefield to a high level of performance.
Such changes would only result in the standards rising, so we'd still be in the same rough pattern as today. Women allowed into the IG, but still having to meet the same requirements and between that and the natural state of human society being for men to go to war over women results in fewer women overall in the IG.
And if humans have become stronger, it stands to reason that everything will have gotten heavier to match. You're carrying more body armor and gear because you can carry more.
I completely disagree on that last point.
The humble Lasgun is an absolute miracle weapon. Easy to produce, ridiculously easy to use, lightweight in construction and ammo. An effective gun which even the most backwards of primitive recruits can quickly learn how to use. Flak Armour is “good enough”. Mostly there seemingly to prevent flesh wounds and shrapnel (which would include debris from exploding cover) is still made from materials available 39,000 years from now, so isn’t necessarily heavy.
You don’t base your equipment on the average strength, and keep upping its weight as your troops get stronger. You set your basic equipment, then ensure your recruits can like, carry it.
Plus as I said earlier? The Imperial Guard fights from fairly static, prepared positions. And where they need to move swiftly, regiments will have APCs or IFVs of some description to achieve that swiftly and efficiently.
Indeed, a Regiment noted for its widespread use and issue of APC/IFV can stow a lot of its extraneous kit in said vehicle, so they won’t have to lug it around on foot all the time, affecting just how strong you need them to be.
My point is that the bar has a point where once you go above it the gains become less and less great, esp for an army like the Guard which is equipment limited by doctrine. Yes you CAN make better armour - you can make Space Marine grade armour. However the Imperium does not because of its established structure of "how things are gone".
So if the physical body for healthy (or moderately healthy) imperial citizens in the 40K setting is basically at or above the standard bar for men and women then it doesn't matter if peak performance can be greater; they are already above the bar to perform to the required standard.
This. While sexual dimorphism is a thing, it should be basically irrelevant when it comes to strength provided women are strong enough to hit the minimum bar. How far above that bar you are doesn't make a huge difference. The important thing is just being able to reach that bar at all.
Being able to haul a heavy bolter around in your arms and fire it on the move is cool and all, but not a requirement for joining the guard.
And in the 41st millenium, there seem to be a lot of planets where people are encouraged to spend time running, jumping, fighting, etc. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the average woman from such a planet is sufficiently strong to clear the minimum requirements.
The Imperium is stagnant. Not regressive. The technology is does understand is churned in staggering volumes (such as Las Weapons, the understanding of which is such the Imperium can readily scale it up and down, depending on need)
The Cain novels (the main IG ones I’ve read) again make it clear that bionics are far from uncommon. Legs, arms, fingers, lungs, other organs are readily enough available, indeed you just need to survive long enough for them to be installed. And we see them being installed on and into Privates (not Rude Bits, Privates).
Bionics are used exclusively to provide replacements for lost limbs. Again, if Imperium could do what you are suggesting, everybody in the Imperial Guard would have Mark VI MJOLNIR armor or something like that.
You again seem obsessed with physical strength. Whilst handy for fist fights, it just factor when you’re talking about the Imperial Guard, because they’re not a force designed around close range combat.
A Sentinel Pilot or tank crew doesn’t need to be beefcake rippling with well oiled muscles. A line trooper just needs to be able to tell one end of their Lasgun from the other, and shoot reasonably straight.
Your scouts need to be stealthy and enduring. But everyone else tends to fight from relatively static positions, relying on APCs to cart them about where suitable, or only have enough endurance to complete a march or redeployment without needing a Nice Bit Sit Down.
Feed them a high protein diet (hi Solyen Viridians!) and keep them well exercised, and the men and women under your command will perform quite competently.
You are obsessed with irrelevant stuff here. Or are intentionally misinterpreting my argument.
Physical strength was not very relevant for FIGHTING ever since humans made first weapons. Hell, medieval knights did not really need to be all that strong.
It is everything ELSE that you need strength (and endurance) for. Lugging around weapons and equipment. Digging trenches. Pulling out and carrying your injured squadmates. Climbing through forest. And so on.
And all these areas are a) absolutely crucial and b) something where women DO, generally speaking, underperform compared to men.
We also live indolent lives the like most Imperial Citizens can only dream of. Not for us the eternal drudgery of living in a Hive. Not for us the honest physical toil of an Agri-World. Harsh environments breed resilient humans. Apply that selective pressure across 10,000 years, and what’s that going to do to baseline strength and toughness of the populace? That’s right, it’s naturally going to preserve the strongest and toughest members, as those not physically capable don’t breed as often or possibly at all.
Put steroids and growth hormones in the general water supply, and what’s that gonna do? Increase muscle mass. Making for a stronger population better able to carry out manual labour.
And that will be true for men and women both, meaning that men will still perform better than women.
And again? You only need your Guard Soldiers to be strong and fit enough to carry their gear and fight effectively. That’s it. And if you argue women are inherently weak? Go Google “Rhea Ripley Back Muscles”. Whilst a genuinely exceptional woman, go back to my comment above about the different selective pressures 10,000+ years on an Imperial World, and how’ll they’ll shift the baseline norm.
The figures you shared are also barely relevant. Because there, you’re talking Optional Recruitment. Not Conscription. When you’re conscripting? You have a lower threshold because it’s the body count you’re after, not some (ultimately arbitrary) physical benchmark.
Now, not all Imperial worlds practice conscription or press ganging, but it’s far from unheard of.
Individual exceptions hardly support OP's argument that women should be anything more than... well... individual exception in the Imperial Guard.
Let me remind you that we are talking about the IMPERIAL GUARD here. It literally doesn't matter how individual worlds recruit their troops: Guard regiments provided by these worlds will be (or are supposed to be) the best of the best. And that means that yes, they will have standards.
Seems to me you just want to complain without even trying to understand the topic we are talking about.
I think there a lot of people over egging how high the standards are in the guard and the pdf.
To liken the pdf to a modern professional western army is a huge mistake. The pdf is much more like the territorial or reservist army. They famously in the setting aren’t that good. The bar for entry is pretty much being keen enough to do it.
The guard at least have semblance of professionalism about them but again it’s about numbers not quality. If a governor has to give a million able bodied people to the tithe the bar for entry again won’t be that high. All the fluff written of IG recruits has them being pretty poor and only toughened up and made good by experience.
As such recruiting women has no barriers at all in setting. And all the current guard books have a good number of women in most the regiments depicted.
It seems that a lot of people here are using real world “facts” that are really just thinly veiled misogynistic rhetoric to try and impose their world view on a fictional setting that is clearly now moving in a different direction, a direction that is much more inclusive.
It seems that a lot of people here are using real world “facts” that are really just thinly veiled misogynistic rhetoric to try and impose their world view on a fictional setting that is clearly now moving in a different direction, a direction that is much more inclusive.
And to describe IG recruits as “the best of the best” is frankly laughable.
Different worlds have different approaches. All that matters to the Administratum is that when you’re told to provide recruits, you provide them on time. That could be fresh recruits to replace losses, or the founding of a whole new regiment.
Some will provide crack troops, well trained and drilled. Some will provide troops with a crack habit (hi Savlar!). Some will provide whatever they can. Formal recruitment, press ganging, conscription. It’s all fair game and largely down to the Planetary Governor’s discretion, and how far they want to take the recruit, equip, and train of their overall obligations.
And then you've some worlds like Cadia, Catachan and such which are clearly built as world-sized army recruitment and training worlds. Designed socially, structurally and all to produce elite trained troops for war. Their prime export and reason is to produce highly trained troops from their population.
Part of the tithing process is a requirement of levels of training/experience.
A governor who provides untrained cannon fodder when they were expected to provide trained, slightly experienced soldiers is going to be getting a visit from an Arbites Exaction Team.
Kanluwen wrote: Part of the tithing process is a requirement of levels of training/experience.
A governor who provides untrained cannon fodder when they were expected to provide trained, slightly experienced soldiers is going to be getting a visit from an Arbites Exaction Team.
And the administratum is a slick well oiled that machines that ensures all recruits are highest quality.
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Overread wrote: And then you've some worlds like Cadia, Catachan and such which are clearly built as world-sized army recruitment and training worlds. Designed socially, structurally and all to produce elite trained troops for war. Their prime export and reason is to produce highly trained troops from their population.
And both of those worlds are depicted as having a high proportion of soldiers be female, both in fluff and in models now.
I’m not sure the homeWorld is expected to provide troops with much training. The lord I’m familiar with talks about regiments receiving their training in the way to the warzone. Again, some regiments will be ahead of the game if they recruit from PDF or gangers or suchlike, but I’m sure for others, they will embark with nothing much.
Flinty wrote: I’m not sure the homeWorld is expected to provide troops with much training. The lord I’m familiar with talks about regiments receiving their training in the way to the warzone. Again, some regiments will be ahead of the game if they recruit from PDF or gangers or suchlike, but I’m sure for others, they will embark with nothing much.
And not every world will be able to provide their troops with Experience.
Training? Sure, how to work as a unit, how to use and maintain your equipment.
But experience requires some kind of combat situation to blood them.
And also there are quite some metrics for what is good. In a region that has a history of unreliable troops, uprisings and mutiny, a planet with a grading system that selects the 10% of pdf with the best loyalty to the imperium, devotion to the imperial creed and obedience to authorities (valueing these over physical fitness) makes a lot of sense and should (in my opinion) have the blessing of the Munitorum.
Flinty wrote:I’m not sure the homeWorld is expected to provide troops with much training. The lord I’m familiar with talks about regiments receiving their training in the way to the warzone. Again, some regiments will be ahead of the game if they recruit from PDF or gangers or suchlike, but I’m sure for others, they will embark with nothing much.
This is going to be one of those telephone threads, I just know it...
They're expected to get at least the equivalent of a "boot camp" from their homeworld. The training "received on the way to the warzone" is specialized, warzone specific training and regular training/refresher courses.
And that's not even getting into the officer corps, of which there's usually offworlders serving at a senior level if it's a brand new, fresh-faced founding from a world that's never had one before.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Flinty wrote: I’m not sure the homeWorld is expected to provide troops with much training. The lord I’m familiar with talks about regiments receiving their training in the way to the warzone. Again, some regiments will be ahead of the game if they recruit from PDF or gangers or suchlike, but I’m sure for others, they will embark with nothing much.
And not every world will be able to provide their troops with Experience.
Training? Sure, how to work as a unit, how to use and maintain your equipment.
But experience requires some kind of combat situation to blood them.
So what experience do Catachans bring to the table? The Tanith?
"Experience" isn't necessarily people firing back at you.
The Tanith militia experience was countering poachers & illegal loggers, plus a world with a warp-touched forest that tried to make them lose their bearings every chance it got.
Catachans are dealing with their homeworld and its many creative ways to kill them.
But again, you're missing the key part of what I said: Worlds are told what they're expected to provide.
Tanith wasn't expected to provide full regiments of heavy armoured grenadiers. They were expected to provide three regiments of light infantry, "for reconnaissance work".
When a regiment of raw recruits is required? That's what they'll be told they're supposed to provide.
If they're told "provide us with a regiment, made up of combat veterans who've already worked together"...that's what they'll be told they're supposed to provide.
The "how" they do it is up to the planet. Hunger Games, Gang Wars, whatever. The Imperium doesn't care as long as it receives a proper tithe. Screw up when it comes to this and it's clear that you did it on purpose? Congrats, you're a heretic sympathizer!
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Pyroalchi wrote: And also there are quite some metrics for what is good. In a region that has a history of unreliable troops, uprisings and mutiny, a planet with a grading system that selects the 10% of pdf with the best loyalty to the imperium, devotion to the imperial creed and obedience to authorities (valueing these over physical fitness) makes a lot of sense and should (in my opinion) have the blessing of the Munitorum.
Planets like that find their way quickly into providing Penal Legions rather than founding Regiments...
Kanluwen wrote: Part of the tithing process is a requirement of levels of training/experience.
Define "trained". To the Cadians, it means drilled from childhood in the ways of soldiering. To the Kanak Skulltakers, it means getting a laspistol and being pointed in the direction of the foe.
"Trained" soldiers come in many shapes, sizes, and qualities. Regiments can break on their first tour of duty or they can last a lifetime and it doesn't matter what world they are from or what training they received.
Being the "best" of a locally trained army that serves on permanent garrison duty and is more likely to be used as an addition to local enforcers or Arbites doesn't mean PDF soldiers are automatically expert marksmen, adamant defenders, or brave attackers.
Sure a Governor gets punished for sending "sub-standard" troops but what is the standard and how is it applied? For example, the Skadi Second Infantry was tithed and received 80 days of basic training before being shipped off to a planet to quell an Ork invasion where they were wiped out. The local Governor's response was to say how brave the Regiment had been in holding off the Orks and recommended more Regiments be raised from Skadi.
There are also examples of Regiments that don't get trained in the use of all possible Guard equipment. The Finreht Highlanders are drawn from primitive tribes and the tithed soldiers get given basic training and the lowest tech support weapons because of this. The officers are slightly more "civilised" and get slightly more advanced gear but not the common soldier.
Being "trained" or having "experience" doesn't mean diddly squat when we're talking about the whole Imperial Guard recruiting process and not individual Regiments from specific worlds.
So the 2008 codex has some useful quotes, but as with all GW background, it’s sufficiently vague to permit a wide range of interpretation. The below is from p9 and 10 of the codex.
“As part of their tithe Imperial Governors are obliged to send no less than one tenth of their overall fighting force, and as much more as the Departmento Munitorum feel necessary…”
“In any case, should the tithe be of an unacceptable quality, the Imperial Governors life is forfeit. For this reason those soldiers selected for the Imperial Guard tend to be drawn from the elite of a planets troops.”
“Many of the newly raised regiments inducted into the Imperial Guard will already have some modicum of fighting experience. This may have taken the form of formal military instruction or simply the result of the instincts necessary to stay alive on their respective home worlds.
…
In any case, during the long voyage between their home world and the regiments destination, the newly inducted guardsmen will receive intensive training that tempers the natural fighting skills of their many disparate cultures and forged them into soldiers worthy of the Imperial Guard.”
There is a bit more but I’m on my phone and typing is annoying.
The Munitorum Manual and the contemporary Codex states
“ When a tithe is taken in men under arms, soldiers will be recruited in much the same way as they are for the PDF and sometimes entire regiments will be raised from the PDF itself.”
So there is an expectation that a tithe is 10% of the standing PDF, but that tithed regiments could be raised for the purpose and not just taken from the PDF. There is a tendency to send the best troops, but that implies not always. Some regiments will have experience, but not all. Training is provided en route to the awesome. No further clarity is given in these sources as to the extent of that training, but it implies that a tithe could comprise raw recruits with no prior training or experience, who get trained entirely on the way.
So as with most 40k lore questions, there is enough wiggle room for any type of regiment you want from any type of planetary background and technology base, gender balance and starting point of experience.
Arguing that the background somehow precludes recruitment of substantial female cohorts of Guardswomen makes no sense to me.
Andykp wrote: I think there a lot of people over egging how high the standards are in the guard and the pdf.
To liken the pdf to a modern professional western army is a huge mistake. The pdf is much more like the territorial or reservist army. They famously in the setting aren’t that good. The bar for entry is pretty much being keen enough to do it.
The guard at least have semblance of professionalism about them but again it’s about numbers not quality. If a governor has to give a million able bodied people to the tithe the bar for entry again won’t be that high. All the fluff written of IG recruits has them being pretty poor and only toughened up and made good by experience.
As such recruiting women has no barriers at all in setting. And all the current guard books have a good number of women in most the regiments depicted.
It seems that a lot of people here are using real world “facts” that are really just thinly veiled misogynistic rhetoric to try and impose their world view on a fictional setting that is clearly now moving in a different direction, a direction that is much more inclusive.
Do you really think that "territorial" or "reservist" army is automatically crap?
No, they are not good IN THE SETTING. That doesn't mean that they are bad by real-life standards. I have read a lot of descriptions of PDF, and I can tell you that both historically and currently there were and are first world armies that are worse than typical depiction of PDF. Not every army is the US Army.
And at any rate, number of women in PDF was not something that was ever being discussed here. We are talking here about why women wouldn't be numerous in the Guard. If that is mysoginy to you, then reality is mysognistic. And Imperium isn't at peace, it doesn't have leave to just ignore reality or worry about the stuff like "inclusivity" the way modern-day First World nations do. Not that stuff like logic ever really mattered that much in the setting...
You want all-female or majority-female IG regiments? Sure, why not. Just have planets that send primarily or only their women to the army for cultural or practical reasons (an example I already provided - a mining world where men have to be employed as miners). But there is no way women would be a large proportion of Guard as a whole.
Andykp wrote: I think there a lot of people over egging how high the standards are in the guard and the pdf.
To liken the pdf to a modern professional western army is a huge mistake. The pdf is much more like the territorial or reservist army. They famously in the setting aren’t that good. The bar for entry is pretty much being keen enough to do it.
The guard at least have semblance of professionalism about them but again it’s about numbers not quality. If a governor has to give a million able bodied people to the tithe the bar for entry again won’t be that high. All the fluff written of IG recruits has them being pretty poor and only toughened up and made good by experience.
As such recruiting women has no barriers at all in setting. And all the current guard books have a good number of women in most the regiments depicted.
It seems that a lot of people here are using real world “facts” that are really just thinly veiled misogynistic rhetoric to try and impose their world view on a fictional setting that is clearly now moving in a different direction, a direction that is much more inclusive.
Do you really think that "territorial" or "reservist" army is automatically crap?
No, they are not good IN THE SETTING. That doesn't mean that they are bad by real-life standards. I have read a lot of descriptions of PDF, and I can tell you that both historically and currently there were and are first world armies that are worse than typical depiction of PDF. Not every army is the US Army.
And at any rate, number of women in PDF was not something that was ever being discussed here. We are talking here about why women wouldn't be numerous in the Guard. If that is mysoginy to you, then reality is mysognistic. And Imperium isn't at peace, it doesn't have leave to just ignore reality or worry about the stuff like "inclusivity" the way modern-day First World nations do. Not that stuff like logic ever really mattered that much in the setting...
You want all-female or majority-female IG regiments? Sure, why not. Just have planets that send primarily or only their women to the army for cultural or practical reasons (an example I already provided - a mining world where men have to be employed as miners). But there is no way women would be a large proportion of Guard as a whole.
My point was real examples are irrelevant, and trying to use them as a reason to justify not having female soldiers in the imperial guard not only goes against the established lore, the model range and the clear direction gamesworkshop are taking the guard.
And yes I see your arguments as misogynistic because using real world misogyny as a reason for excluding women from a fictional setting kind of is. And as for reality being misogynistic, yeah it is, so let’s not double down on that by forcing it into fantasy fictional settings as well.
Thankfully gamesworkshop have seen the light and the obvious financial benefits from being more inclusive, but sadly the community is slower to catch up. As for the imperium, I’m not sure the imperium gives a damn about gender. The fact is every bit of guard fiction and lore for the last few years has including numerous women in the regiments in combat and command roles and it isn’t an issue to anyone in setting that they are there because it is normal.
So my reply to the original post is that there’s no need for segregated regiments anymore in universe because the guard doesn’t discriminate.
Calling people autistic or whatever is hardly a winning argument, it in fact makes your post the cringy one and not in a good way.
Nobody is saying female IG don't exist, that is most definitely not true. But it is 100% true to say that female recruits do make up the minority when looking at it overall. And there are many factors which would contribute to this, both in the real world and in this fictional setting.
Whether or not you agree with the historical and current reasons women don't make up an even ratio of military forces, fictional or real, doesn't mean those reasons don't exist. Reality doesn't care about your feelings.
Also, your example of the Sororitas is not helping your argument. They exist only because the Ecclesiarchy rules lawyered their way back to having military forces, as they were banned from having "men under arms" after the Apostasy. This still implies that gender roles are still a thing in much of Imperial society, otherwise the Sororitas being specifically all female would really have no meaning.
So again, if someone wants to have a special all female or pure 50/50 IG regiment from a specific world, yes they can absolutely do that. Doesn't change that it is the exception and not the rule, the rule being that women do exist in most IG regiments, but at a lesser ratio than men generally speaking.
Calling people autistic or whatever is hardly a winning argument, it in fact makes your post the cringy one and not in a good way.
Nobody is saying female IG don't exist, that is most definitely not true. But it is 100% true to say that female recruits do make up the minority when looking at it overall. And there are many factors which would contribute to this, both in the real world and in this fictional setting.
Whether or not you agree with the historical and current reasons women don't make up an even ratio of military forces, fictional or real, doesn't mean those reasons don't exist. Reality doesn't care about your feelings.
Also, your example of the Sororitas is not helping your argument. They exist only because the Ecclesiarchy rules lawyered their way back to having military forces, as they were banned from having "men under arms" after the Apostasy. This still implies that gender roles are still a thing in much of Imperial society, otherwise the Sororitas being specifically all female would really have no meaning.
So again, if someone wants to have a special all female or pure 50/50 IG regiment from a specific world, yes they can absolutely do that. Doesn't change that it is the exception and not the rule, the rule being that women do exist in most IG regiments, but at a lesser ratio than men generally speaking.
Can you provide a single in-universe source stating that there's more men than women in the Imperial Guard?
Given that the majority of the characters in any of the novels with the IG are male(not just named characters, all people in a novel period) and extrapolating from real world compositions of military forces throughout history I am confidant that it is the case. It is on you to provide sources saying they are not.
Using real world militaries is flawed as none of our societies are remotely similar to that of the Imperium. Even historical examples of authoritarian or fascist states don't fully work because they still don't have the level of disregard for human life that drives the Imperium.
Likewise, using the example that "most" BL fiction only has male soldiers is also flawed because it ignores the real world cultural influences on why that is the case. For many years 40k (much like Transformers) was marketed as a Boys Toy, so additional media followed that marketing by having characters in books and games be largely male so that boys could identify with them and buy the product. GW has thankfully dropped this idiotic marketing choice.
It's been proven multiple times in this thread that the 40k background has the Guard recruit soldiers without regard for creed (as long as the Emperor is their God), culture or reproductive organs.
Why is it so important for you folks to have a majority male Imperial Guard? Why spend pages arguing that women can't be soldiers? What purpose does it serve other than to further pile onto an already marginalised group within the hobby?
Andykp wrote: I think there a lot of people over egging how high the standards are in the guard and the pdf.
To liken the pdf to a modern professional western army is a huge mistake. The pdf is much more like the territorial or reservist army. They famously in the setting aren’t that good. The bar for entry is pretty much being keen enough to do it.
The guard at least have semblance of professionalism about them but again it’s about numbers not quality. If a governor has to give a million able bodied people to the tithe the bar for entry again won’t be that high. All the fluff written of IG recruits has them being pretty poor and only toughened up and made good by experience.
As such recruiting women has no barriers at all in setting. And all the current guard books have a good number of women in most the regiments depicted.
It seems that a lot of people here are using real world “facts” that are really just thinly veiled misogynistic rhetoric to try and impose their world view on a fictional setting that is clearly now moving in a different direction, a direction that is much more inclusive.
Do you really think that "territorial" or "reservist" army is automatically crap?
No, they are not good IN THE SETTING. That doesn't mean that they are bad by real-life standards. I have read a lot of descriptions of PDF, and I can tell you that both historically and currently there were and are first world armies that are worse than typical depiction of PDF. Not every army is the US Army.
And at any rate, number of women in PDF was not something that was ever being discussed here. We are talking here about why women wouldn't be numerous in the Guard. If that is mysoginy to you, then reality is mysognistic. And Imperium isn't at peace, it doesn't have leave to just ignore reality or worry about the stuff like "inclusivity" the way modern-day First World nations do. Not that stuff like logic ever really mattered that much in the setting...
You want all-female or majority-female IG regiments? Sure, why not. Just have planets that send primarily or only their women to the army for cultural or practical reasons (an example I already provided - a mining world where men have to be employed as miners). But there is no way women would be a large proportion of Guard as a whole.
My point was real examples are irrelevant, and trying to use them as a reason to justify not having female soldiers in the imperial guard not only goes against the established lore, the model range and the clear direction gamesworkshop are taking the guard.
And yes I see your arguments as misogynistic because using real world misogyny as a reason for excluding women from a fictional setting kind of is. And as for reality being misogynistic, yeah it is, so let’s not double down on that by forcing it into fantasy fictional settings as well.
Thankfully gamesworkshop have seen the light and the obvious financial benefits from being more inclusive, but sadly the community is slower to catch up. As for the imperium, I’m not sure the imperium gives a damn about gender. The fact is every bit of guard fiction and lore for the last few years has including numerous women in the regiments in combat and command roles and it isn’t an issue to anyone in setting that they are there because it is normal.
So my reply to the original post is that there’s no need for segregated regiments anymore in universe because the guard doesn’t discriminate.
So whenever reality disagrees with your opinion, reality is misogynistic.
There are real, practical reasons for women not serving in combat roles. That is not misogyny. And just ignoring these issues does nobody any favor.
Again, there are ways around it. Introduce cultural reasons for why women would serve in the Guard despite all the practical issues. Give everybody power armor and thus make physical issues irrelevant.
But just pretending that these issues don't exist and that it is "all misogyny" is dumb AF.
Why is it so important for you folks to have a majority male Imperial Guard?
Why is it so important for you folks to have a majority female Imperial Guard? Why assume women are more common in this universe as soldiers just because you want it when it isn't explicitly stated that women in 40k are different than women on our current earth? If they aren't even the same as earth 2023 women why caring so much about having them be more physically equal to men in a dystopian future?
World building only works if most things that aren't directly contradicted works as it does in our world. Would be awfully boring wold building if they have to write out exactly what remains the same so the assumption is that everything is unless stated. If you say women are stronger in 40k and equal to modern men just because there is nothing that prevents it I can just as easily say that men in 40k are even stronger than that and 40k men are EVEN better as soldier material than women in this dystopian future because there is nothing in the lore that contradicts my statement.
No one says there are no women in the guard or that women can't perform well enough to be there. But there are a multitude of logical reasons why they are a minority. If it is 0.1% or lower women or 10% women is harder to know but I think you have to be delusional if you think it is solely because people are sexist that they argue for men to be a majority of the soldiers in the Imperial Guard. Unless you think reality is sexist of course and it is wrong to be "correct".
The evidence, which is the background, demonstrates Mixed Sex regiments are unusual. But all male or all female regiments are not.
Exact proportion? Absolutely no idea. But given all-female regiments aren’t presented as remarkable or unusual, we can only assume it’s a common and widespread practice. And given the numbers needed for the Imperial Guard, the safest conclusion is the Imperium doesn’t care what Rude Bits you may or may not be packing.
The Imperium is a horrific entity, but there’s no suggestion at all it’s inwardly sexist, racist or what have you. Got the requisite number of limbs and both your eyes? The Guard will have you.
I don't think anyone is arguing against that at all. Female regiments are common enough that it isn't unusual and there are billions of people in the guard so there are of course a lot of female guardsmen. But how common do they have to be for them to not be unusual? If there are enough regiments fighting in any large scale conflict odds are there will be female regiments there. Might not be common for each male regiment to fight right next to a female regiment while at the same time it being common for a male regiment to be in the same overall war/large scale battle as a female regiment. Could be 1 in 1000, 1 in a 100 or 1 in 10 or even more common than that. All depends on what you mean with "common".
But I think most people, wish I could say all here, agree that the majority, if not the vast majority, is expected to be men unless we get some background reason for why it wouldn't be the case.
I think a fundamental point people are having trouble grasping is that the guard doesn't need to have a majority female or large numbers of female warriors for it to not be a rare thing that people remark on.
In a society that shows pretty much a generic equal rights for male and female, the fact that a women is in the guard doesn't bat an eyelid because women hold the same rights as men. Even if there's only a few, its not remarked on because there like as not are not many "men things" and "women things" in the setting itself.
At least when we view the Imperium as a whole. Of course within that we will get worlds where there ARE male-female divides that are more marked; and social groups within that are more extreme than the normal (Eg Escher gangs).
So we don't have to fight over how many females are needed in the infantry or how many female dominated; we have to just accept that its normal for women to do it and that how many will vary situation to situation. But its nothing more extreme than a man making his own bed or a woman driving a car (at least in western societies today)
Also because its the Imperium we could argue till the cows have come home about how many something is because there's almost infinite variety within the setting.
Klickor wrote: Gert seems to think majority should be female since he can't understand why others argue for the majority to be male other than them hating women.
Cool, never said that the Guard should be majority women. What I have been opposed to is the posts about how women can't or shouldn't be in the Guard using a variety of largely sexist reasoning.
If you are going interact with my posts, please do me the courtesy of actually reading them.
Andykp wrote: I think there a lot of people over egging how high the standards are in the guard and the pdf.
To liken the pdf to a modern professional western army is a huge mistake. The pdf is much more like the territorial or reservist army. They famously in the setting aren’t that good. The bar for entry is pretty much being keen enough to do it.
The guard at least have semblance of professionalism about them but again it’s about numbers not quality. If a governor has to give a million able bodied people to the tithe the bar for entry again won’t be that high. All the fluff written of IG recruits has them being pretty poor and only toughened up and made good by experience.
As such recruiting women has no barriers at all in setting. And all the current guard books have a good number of women in most the regiments depicted.
It seems that a lot of people here are using real world “facts” that are really just thinly veiled misogynistic rhetoric to try and impose their world view on a fictional setting that is clearly now moving in a different direction, a direction that is much more inclusive.
Do you really think that "territorial" or "reservist" army is automatically crap?
No, they are not good IN THE SETTING. That doesn't mean that they are bad by real-life standards. I have read a lot of descriptions of PDF, and I can tell you that both historically and currently there were and are first world armies that are worse than typical depiction of PDF. Not every army is the US Army.
And at any rate, number of women in PDF was not something that was ever being discussed here. We are talking here about why women wouldn't be numerous in the Guard. If that is mysoginy to you, then reality is mysognistic. And Imperium isn't at peace, it doesn't have leave to just ignore reality or worry about the stuff like "inclusivity" the way modern-day First World nations do. Not that stuff like logic ever really mattered that much in the setting...
You want all-female or majority-female IG regiments? Sure, why not. Just have planets that send primarily or only their women to the army for cultural or practical reasons (an example I already provided - a mining world where men have to be employed as miners). But there is no way women would be a large proportion of Guard as a whole.
My point was real examples are irrelevant, and trying to use them as a reason to justify not having female soldiers in the imperial guard not only goes against the established lore, the model range and the clear direction gamesworkshop are taking the guard.
And yes I see your arguments as misogynistic because using real world misogyny as a reason for excluding women from a fictional setting kind of is. And as for reality being misogynistic, yeah it is, so let’s not double down on that by forcing it into fantasy fictional settings as well.
Thankfully gamesworkshop have seen the light and the obvious financial benefits from being more inclusive, but sadly the community is slower to catch up. As for the imperium, I’m not sure the imperium gives a damn about gender. The fact is every bit of guard fiction and lore for the last few years has including numerous women in the regiments in combat and command roles and it isn’t an issue to anyone in setting that they are there because it is normal.
So my reply to the original post is that there’s no need for segregated regiments anymore in universe because the guard doesn’t discriminate.
So whenever reality disagrees with your opinion, reality is misogynistic.
There are real, practical reasons for women not serving in combat roles. That is not misogyny. And just ignoring these issues does nobody any favor.
Again, there are ways around it. Introduce cultural reasons for why women would serve in the Guard despite all the practical issues. Give everybody power armor and thus make physical issues irrelevant.
But just pretending that these issues don't exist and that it is "all misogyny" is dumb AF.
*Im only going to reply to this post because I have clearly missed some stuff with gen deleted post and it fall out.*
It’s not reality disagreeing with my opinions. It’s your sexist arguments disagreeing with them, you are highlighting misogyny as reasons why women, in a fictional setting have to comply to certain tropes. And the key here is the word fictional. Using real world inequality and bias to apply arbitrary rules to a made up fantasy setting is reinforcing the bias and excluding people from the hobby.
Why you feel the need to do this is anyone’s guess and not a road I’m willing to go down, but I do believe we have a responsibility to call out this kind of passive prejudice if we are going to try and make the community less toxic.
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Overread wrote: I think a fundamental point people are having trouble grasping is that the guard doesn't need to have a majority female or large numbers of female warriors for it to not be a rare thing that people remark on.
In a society that shows pretty much a generic equal rights for male and female, the fact that a women is in the guard doesn't bat an eyelid because women hold the same rights as men. Even if there's only a few, its not remarked on because there like as not are not many "men things" and "women things" in the setting itself.
At least when we view the Imperium as a whole. Of course within that we will get worlds where there ARE male-female divides that are more marked; and social groups within that are more extreme than the normal (Eg Escher gangs).
So we don't have to fight over how many females are needed in the infantry or how many female dominated; we have to just accept that its normal for women to do it and that how many will vary situation to situation. But its nothing more extreme than a man making his own bed or a woman driving a car (at least in western societies today)
Also because its the Imperium we could argue till the cows have come home about how many something is because there's almost infinite variety within the setting.
This seems entirely reasonable to me. Shouldn’t be hard for everyone to grasp that concept.
I think there is a distinction that is being lost in much of the discussion between the Imperium, as a sort of feudal entity, and the individual worlds it tithes from. They have different priorities.
Also, for the record, I have seen no one argue for a female majority within the Imperial Guard. I think the position of some posters is that there should be gender parity rather than swinging the imbalance the other way.
Equally, I do not think I have seen anyone arguing that there are no women fighting in the Guard routinely, as there clearly are. This probably precludes female soldiers being as rare as, say 1:1000 or 1:100, although I think the ballpark of 1:10 would satisfy the concept of routine whilst still being a minority.
However, the important point is that women are common enough in the Guard that there is zero lore reason not to include large numbers of them in the model range or in your personal army.
Flinty wrote: So the 2008 codex has some useful quotes, but as with all GW background, it’s sufficiently vague to permit a wide range of interpretation. The below is from p9 and 10 of the codex.
“As part of their tithe Imperial Governors are obliged to send no less than one tenth of their overall fighting force, and as much more as the Departmento Munitorum feel necessary…”
“In any case, should the tithe be of an unacceptable quality, the Imperial Governors life is forfeit. For this reason those soldiers selected for the Imperial Guard tend to be drawn from the elite of a planets troops.”
“Many of the newly raised regiments inducted into the Imperial Guard will already have some modicum of fighting experience. This may have taken the form of formal military instruction or simply the result of the instincts necessary to stay alive on their respective home worlds. … In any case, during the long voyage between their home world and the regiments destination, the newly inducted guardsmen will receive intensive training that tempers the natural fighting skills of their many disparate cultures and forged them into soldiers worthy of the Imperial Guard.”
There is a bit more but I’m on my phone and typing is annoying.
The Munitorum Manual and the contemporary Codex states “ When a tithe is taken in men under arms, soldiers will be recruited in much the same way as they are for the PDF and sometimes entire regiments will be raised from the PDF itself.”
So there is an expectation that a tithe is 10% of the standing PDF, but that tithed regiments could be raised for the purpose and not just taken from the PDF. There is a tendency to send the best troops, but that implies not always. Some regiments will have experience, but not all. Training is provided en route to the awesome. No further clarity is given in these sources as to the extent of that training, but it implies that a tithe could comprise raw recruits with no prior training or experience, who get trained entirely on the way.
So as with most 40k lore questions, there is enough wiggle room for any type of regiment you want from any type of planetary background and technology base, gender balance and starting point of experience.
Arguing that the background somehow precludes recruitment of substantial female cohorts of Guardswomen makes no sense to me.
Yes, this sums up the majority of information about how the Imperium views tithes. The key thing is the punishment for inadequate tithes however- the planetary governor's life is forfeit. Ths is the most powerful person on the world and therefore has a vested interest in protecting their own skin.
The only area of the tithe that is vague, to my knowledge, is what the minimum standard set by the Departmento Munitorum is. My strong suspicion is that the standard varies by the grade of the world- so an industrial or hive world would probably be expected to provide trained troops that come with at least the basic standard of Imperial Guard equipment already (a regiment of Steel Legion comes with Armageddon-produced lasguns, respirators, uniforms etc.), whereas a feral or feudal world is probably not expected to provide much if any equipment and training beyond basic clothes for its tithed soldiers. The facilities simply don't exist on a feral world to train the troops in modern warfare, that has to be done en route. Presumably these troops must still meet a minimum standard, but the parameters are adjusted to what the world is expected to be able to produce. This could be at the individual world level and determined during the assessment of the size of their tithe, or it could be aggregated at the level of world classification- i.e. all feral worlds must provide physically fit recruits capable of XYZ but are not expected to provide equipment. All hive worlds are expected to provide physically fit recruits capable of XYZ but are expected to provide equipment at least including ABC.
But beyond this basic level of variation determined by the capabilities of the world, I think the Imperium has a fairly low bar for troops to pass to meet it's requirements. This has to be the case, because it tithes from such a widely divergent set of environments. The populations of many of those worlds will be in poor health, on the whole, and therefore pretty subpar recruits when compared to healthy, well-nourished individuals from a different world. We have seen similar issues in real world examples- the origins of the modern British healthcare system are because the government was scared at how many recruits were failing the physical standards of the army during the Boer War. They were worried the quality of recruits would be low in a large war requiring mass mobilisation. If WWI had happened a decade earlier, they probably would have had to lower recruitment standards noticeably. Within this variation, sexual dimorphism is less relevant on the scale of the wider Imperium as healthy women from one world are likely to be physically superior to unhealthy men from another.
At the Imperium level, i.e. under the auspices of the Departmento Munitorum, there is no evidence of any gender preference and all indicators are that the Departmento Munitorum does not care so long as the troops are human (or sanctioned abhuman) and met the minimum requirements set for a given world. Based on this alone, you would expect a 50/50 gender split for tithed troops.
However, I think the real thrust of the discussion is at the planetary level. This is where all the discussions about whether the gender of the recruit is sensible matter. It is also where the decisions on who to recruit are made. I think it is highly likely to vary massively by world- as mentioned, a small population on a mechanised agri world (the most common type of agri world) may choose to preferentially tithe males to maintain population integrity, as they are not guaranteed replacement population if the birth rate falls too low. The mechanised nature of the agriculture means that individual strength and endurance is less of a factor for the world's output.
Equally, as mentioned, a fairly unmechanised mining world may choose to retain male pit workers to avoid impacting their primary tithe output and instead send female soldiers into the guard.
Many hive worlds probably don't care as they commonly recruit various ganger scum from the underhive as this works as a societal pressure valve for removing armed dissidents in a productive way. Gangs tend to be recruited wholesale as these form cohesive military units off the bat. Therefore, the gender of troops will match the gender of gangs within the underhive, which may well be 50:50 on the whole due to gangs basically being tribes and settlements in their own right.
But on the whole, as worlds tend to send some of their highest-quality troops to avoid running afoul of the minimum tithe requirements and it probably is reasonable to assume that men continue to have greater physical endurance on the whole, I think it probably is likely that women are a minority in the Imperial Guard, albeit a sizeable one. However, we simply do not have any lore to confirm either way. My suspicion would be somewhere in the ballpark of 15-35% based on the high proportion of hive worlds within the Imperium. Of course, this is a number that GW won't and probably shouldn't ever confirm.
PDFs, on the other hand, are much more likely to have gender parity across the Imperium with a 50:50 split in my opinion, especially if they are operated primarily on a militia system. There is basically no reason not to include women in any kind of militia.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: The evidence, which is the background, demonstrates Mixed Sex regiments are unusual. But all male or all female regiments are not.
Exact proportion? Absolutely no idea. But given all-female regiments aren’t presented as remarkable or unusual, we can only assume it’s a common and widespread practice. And given the numbers needed for the Imperial Guard, the safest conclusion is the Imperium doesn’t care what Rude Bits you may or may not be packing.
The Imperium is a horrific entity, but there’s no suggestion at all it’s inwardly sexist, racist or what have you. Got the requisite number of limbs and both your eyes? The Guard will have you.
Absurd. The guard surely doesn't require you have both eyes!
This sums things up pretty well, I think. We know monogendered regiments exist. We know women in the guard exist in general and are common enough to go unremarked. Given how quickly the imperium goes through soldiers, it makes more sense for the prerequisites of the guard to be lax enough for any sexual dimorphism to not be a major factor.
We can't say with confidence how much of a gender gap there is or isn't within the guard, but we can say that women are common enough that no one seems to feel compelled to comment on it when a guardswoman is in a scene. So any argument claiming that the gender gap is very large seems unlikely. If only 1 in 10,000 guard were women, I feel like we'd get more scenes where someone comments on how rare guardswomen are. If only 1 in 10 were women, maybe you could reasonably not have it remarked upon, but that still feels like a bit of a stretch. The impression I get is that women make up at least 20% of all guarsdmen, and I don't see much reason it couldn't be as high as 50%.
Also, on single sex regiments? In the Cain novels it’s presented as a way to prevent Regimental Babies, and indeed inappropriate connections between individual Guardsmen which may cloud judgement in combat. At least in the Valhallan tradition.
One bythought that at least to me seems interesting: way back when I was conscripted in the Bundesweh small (< 1,65m) recruits were preferably selected for the tank battalions as it was always mentioned that they fit better into the tight spaces and a lot of jobs in the tanks don't really need a lot of strength. Now I don't know if the Leman Russ tank needs a sledgehammer to shift gears as it is sometimes half jokingly said about the T34 or if it is a smothely oiled machine that shifts gears by the touch of a fingertip, but theoritically if the sex dimorphism is still present in the 41st millenium, women could be very preferably as tankers.
Specific model of the Leman Russ (chassis, not armanent), competence and diligence of your assigned Enginseers, availability of spares and repairs and holy unguents and that.
Pyroalchi wrote: One bythought that at least to me seems interesting: way back when I was conscripted in the Bundesweh small (< 1,65m) recruits were preferably selected for the tank battalions as it was always mentioned that they fit better into the tight spaces and a lot of jobs in the tanks don't really need a lot of strength. Now I don't know if the Leman Russ tank needs a sledgehammer to shift gears as it is sometimes half jokingly said about the T34 or if it is a smothely oiled machine that shifts gears by the touch of a fingertip, but theoritically if the sex dimorphism is still present in the 41st millenium, women could be very preferably as tankers.
So Girls und Panzer could literally be canon in 40k. This amuses me.
40k wouldn't be the first to touch on that concept. That was a plot point in the novel Starship Troopers, iirc, as most pilots were women as they were smaller and apparently could resist G-Forces better.
On the issue of governor’s being forfeit, this will be subject to the usual level of corruption and politics. If it’s convenient to the powers that be, then poor tithe performance can be cited on the execution warrant. Otherwise, it will be conveniently glossed over.
It’s still something easily, well solved, I guess post initial recruitment.
Intense training regimens, Space Vitamins for muscle mass and increased bone density.
I mean, this is an Imperium where House Goliath can use chems and stims to turn a non-Goliath into a Goliath, or something close enough for their tastes, and done with a Clan House’s resources, which are tiny compared to a Governor’s resources.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: It’s still something easily, well solved, I guess post initial recruitment.
Intense training regimens, Space Vitamins for muscle mass and increased bone density.
I mean, this is an Imperium where House Goliath can use chems and stims to turn a non-Goliath into a Goliath, or something close enough for their tastes, and done with a Clan House’s resources, which are tiny compared to a Governor’s resources.
Heck, you can leave the chems out of it (in case they're too hard to source promptly or whatever.) If you're going to pack a bunch of recruits onto a ship and making them spend months in transit, you may as well make them exercise and drill during the voyage.
Flinty wrote: On the issue of governor’s being forfeit, this will be subject to the usual level of corruption and politics. If it’s convenient to the powers that be, then poor tithe performance can be cited on the execution warrant. Otherwise, it will be conveniently glossed over.
Whilst there is undoubtedly lots of corruption and I am sure some governors successfully stay their execution through this, I suspect it is uncommon. Planetary governors are big fish in the small pond of a world, but on the scale of the Imperium they may as well be peons. Life is cheap for the Imperium. There are always more ambitious people willing to take the risks of power.
There are a number of examples of the Administratum appropriating entire worlds on a whim, such as the world of Rophanon. Planetary governors typically have little power beyond their own system, by design.
Worth noting that being assigned to a penal legion is considered an execution as the chances of living redemption are exceptionally slim. I suspect being assigned to command a penal legion would be a common punishment for a governor failing to supply a military tithe of sufficient quality.
I suspect for every one that is killed for providing a poor Tithe, there are others who get off the hook, go into hiding or turn to other forces for support (eg chaos - even without realising it until its too late).
It will vary a lot on the region of space and even with Warp travel its still slow. Some regions might well be quite isolated and thus the ruling powers more free to manipulate. Others might not be remote, but they provide critical resources/materials for a given region. Sure the tithe was poor quality and deserving of an execution, but that world is also producing all the arms and munitions for a vast region. Can you really risk the power vacuum, the power struggle and the chaos of changing the ruling powers? Remember whilst you might execute the figurehead; there's a whole administration, minor lords and other interested parties all below that. The jostling for power or the appointment of someone specific could spark internal stress and conflicts that could see the regions value plummet through internal turmoil.
Overread wrote: I suspect for every one that is killed for providing a poor Tithe, there are others who get off the hook, go into hiding or turn to other forces for support (eg chaos - even without realising it until its too late).
It will vary a lot on the region of space and even with Warp travel its still slow. Some regions might well be quite isolated and thus the ruling powers more free to manipulate. Others might not be remote, but they provide critical resources/materials for a given region. Sure the tithe was poor quality and deserving of an execution, but that world is also producing all the arms and munitions for a vast region. Can you really risk the power vacuum, the power struggle and the chaos of changing the ruling powers? Remember whilst you might execute the figurehead; there's a whole administration, minor lords and other interested parties all below that. The jostling for power or the appointment of someone specific could spark internal stress and conflicts that could see the regions value plummet through internal turmoil.
Yeah. I imagine that the quality of the tithed troops has to be really, really subpar for anyone to actually do anything about it. Especially anything requiring millitary action. Shooting a bit less accurately than the governor's personal private army probably isn't a big deal. And even if it was, you're probably better off sending a sternly-worded letter and maybe applying some soft pressure rather than diverting fleets and armies to weaken a planet's infrastructure and waste quality guard lives in hopes of the planet eventually tithing slightly higher quality soldiers down the road.
Does quality even matter that much? I mean, if you have an absurd population to work with like what the Imperium has, you can afford to play it a bit loose with quality control. Especially if you're a state that doesn't even care all that much for the masses' wellbeing. Like the IoM.
CthuluIsSpy wrote: Does quality even matter that much? I mean, if you have an absurd population to work with like what the Imperium has, you can afford to play it a bit loose with quality control. Especially if you're a state that doesn't even care all that much for the masses' wellbeing. Like the IoM.
Well, there is a tension in the lore between the Imperium's supposedly vast and endless reserves of manpower, and the actual numbers of soldiers that seem to get deployed in major warzones (see the brief mention of the 3rd War for Armageddon earlier). Often the numbers of Imperial Guard troops are in the ballpark of millions at most, when individual worlds have the population to support billions under arms.
That would suggest* that there is some kind of bottleneck in recruitment. However, at that point, why not maximise quality of individual troopers where possible? But this isn't really supported by the lore on the Imperial Guard, where many are dregs not high quality troops.
Another possible reconciliation is that casualty rates are so insanely high that the Imperium cannot mass into the billions on a given day, but billions get fed through the grinder over the weeks and months. That doesn't really tally with the number of veteran units we see though.
Overall, the Imperium feels a bit like medieval feudal nations, in that surprisingly small armies fight for and control (proportionally) surprisingly large numbers of people. The peasants are, to a large extent, treated like property being fought over and not a military resource in their own right. Some of this historically was over concern of rebellion, so the Imperium may do the same and deliberately keep the majority of populations demilitarised to maintain their authoritarian control.
*Really it suggests a mistake on scale by the writers and/or a choice to keep numbers a bit more relatable to readers. But I think it is more fruitful and interesting to try and reconcile the lore we have than simply abandon it as "wrong".
I think the bottleneck is getting materiel mated up with the meat. I fall on the side of the lore writers struggling with scale and numbers rather than it being an in-universe problem in keeping large numbers of troops alive. There will be some war zones where life expectancy will be in minutes or hours, but on the other hand there will be war zones where it is the Imperial forces that are doing the kerb stomping for very little loss, or relatively benign garrison or pax-keeping duties.
The distances and numbers do certainly mess with the writers because the Imperium operates with numbers that are just so far removed from the real world that its very hard to calculate things sensibly.
As for bottlenecks I'd wager there are a few depending on the area. From not enough people in some (yes there's bodies but they are all employed in the manufacturing and farming industry that's supporting the war effort and the whole sector); to not enough transports to move material and people around; to not enough munitions to even political elements whereby one commander steals another's Tithe or such.
I would argue that quality is important, its just often secondary to quantity. It may also vary general to general. Some will have their elites already and just want cannon fodder; others will want for both and some might want for only quality and see the value in an elite army and just never get it.
Clearly the Imperium at large recognises that quality is important, which is why it has worlds like Catachan and Cadia and turns a blind eye to clones on the battlefield from Krieg. However it seems that its not an element the Imperium can muster at large over its whole expanse.
Being in a state of constant war also likely makes speed a limiting factor. Quality takes time and requires more input and sometimes the Imperium just needs an army at X location and can't wait years to train up the troops so they choke their enemy with a mass of bodies and munitions.
CthuluIsSpy wrote: Does quality even matter that much? I mean, if you have an absurd population to work with like what the Imperium has, you can afford to play it a bit loose with quality control. Especially if you're a state that doesn't even care all that much for the masses' wellbeing. Like the IoM.
It’s also going to vary Regiment to Regiment.
Someone like Captain Chenkov, renowned for just sending in wave after wave is probably more concerned that you can catch enough bullets whilst the big boys do their stuff.
Automatically Appended Next Post: And hey, remember, you only technically wasted lives if you lose.
Well, there is a tension in the lore between the Imperium's supposedly vast and endless reserves of manpower, and the actual numbers of soldiers that seem to get deployed in major warzones (see the brief mention of the 3rd War for Armageddon earlier). Often the numbers of Imperial Guard troops are in the ballpark of millions at most, when individual worlds have the population to support billions under arms.
Not really, the IoM's vast and endless reserves ensure that it is easy to replace guardsmen, but doesn't necesarilly means it can deploy vast endless armies because, well that is expensive.
There is only so much weapons, armor, food and space (in a space ship) to support and deploy the guardsmen. The IoM may have endless quatrillions/quintillions on paper, but it definetiely doesn't have endless logistics. Those are your bottlenecks.
Andykp wrote: I think there a lot of people over egging how high the standards are in the guard and the pdf.
To liken the pdf to a modern professional western army is a huge mistake. The pdf is much more like the territorial or reservist army. They famously in the setting aren’t that good. The bar for entry is pretty much being keen enough to do it.
The guard at least have semblance of professionalism about them but again it’s about numbers not quality. If a governor has to give a million able bodied people to the tithe the bar for entry again won’t be that high. All the fluff written of IG recruits has them being pretty poor and only toughened up and made good by experience.
As such recruiting women has no barriers at all in setting. And all the current guard books have a good number of women in most the regiments depicted.
It seems that a lot of people here are using real world “facts” that are really just thinly veiled misogynistic rhetoric to try and impose their world view on a fictional setting that is clearly now moving in a different direction, a direction that is much more inclusive.
Do you really think that "territorial" or "reservist" army is automatically crap?
No, they are not good IN THE SETTING. That doesn't mean that they are bad by real-life standards. I have read a lot of descriptions of PDF, and I can tell you that both historically and currently there were and are first world armies that are worse than typical depiction of PDF. Not every army is the US Army.
And at any rate, number of women in PDF was not something that was ever being discussed here. We are talking here about why women wouldn't be numerous in the Guard. If that is mysoginy to you, then reality is mysognistic. And Imperium isn't at peace, it doesn't have leave to just ignore reality or worry about the stuff like "inclusivity" the way modern-day First World nations do. Not that stuff like logic ever really mattered that much in the setting...
You want all-female or majority-female IG regiments? Sure, why not. Just have planets that send primarily or only their women to the army for cultural or practical reasons (an example I already provided - a mining world where men have to be employed as miners). But there is no way women would be a large proportion of Guard as a whole.
My point was real examples are irrelevant, and trying to use them as a reason to justify not having female soldiers in the imperial guard not only goes against the established lore, the model range and the clear direction gamesworkshop are taking the guard.
And yes I see your arguments as misogynistic because using real world misogyny as a reason for excluding women from a fictional setting kind of is. And as for reality being misogynistic, yeah it is, so let’s not double down on that by forcing it into fantasy fictional settings as well.
Thankfully gamesworkshop have seen the light and the obvious financial benefits from being more inclusive, but sadly the community is slower to catch up. As for the imperium, I’m not sure the imperium gives a damn about gender. The fact is every bit of guard fiction and lore for the last few years has including numerous women in the regiments in combat and command roles and it isn’t an issue to anyone in setting that they are there because it is normal.
So my reply to the original post is that there’s no need for segregated regiments anymore in universe because the guard doesn’t discriminate.
So whenever reality disagrees with your opinion, reality is misogynistic.
There are real, practical reasons for women not serving in combat roles. That is not misogyny. And just ignoring these issues does nobody any favor.
Again, there are ways around it. Introduce cultural reasons for why women would serve in the Guard despite all the practical issues. Give everybody power armor and thus make physical issues irrelevant.
But just pretending that these issues don't exist and that it is "all misogyny" is dumb AF.
*Im only going to reply to this post because I have clearly missed some stuff with gen deleted post and it fall out.*
It’s not reality disagreeing with my opinions. It’s your sexist arguments disagreeing with them, you are highlighting misogyny as reasons why women, in a fictional setting have to comply to certain tropes. And the key here is the word fictional. Using real world inequality and bias to apply arbitrary rules to a made up fantasy setting is reinforcing the bias and excluding people from the hobby.
Why you feel the need to do this is anyone’s guess and not a road I’m willing to go down, but I do believe we have a responsibility to call out this kind of passive prejudice if we are going to try and make the community less toxic.
My arguments are not sexist, unless you think reality is sexist. And if you do, then "sexism" is just a meaningless buzzword and I would ask you to stop using it.
Men and women are biologically and physically different, and these differences have effect on how capable they are of carrying out certain tasks - including in the military. And this means that, if standards are the same for everyone - as they should be - majority of soldiers in the Imperial Guard will be men.
That is a fact.
You want to have mixed regiments? Go for it. You want to have all female regiments? Go for it. You want to have all tankers be women? Why not - that one at least would make sense. But saying that there HAS to be 50% women in the Imperial Guard is just nonsensical.
And world being "fictional" does not give you a leave to just ignore such factors. When writing fiction, world is assumed to be the same as our own except where it is explicitly noted to be different. And if you want to do it, you need to provide some reason or explanation for it.
I mean, you don't assume that every single human in Narnia has psychic powers merely because the world is different from our own?
"Excluding people from the hobby" is just a BS brainless argument. Do you really think people cannot enjoy something unless they can literally insert themselves into the story? Are you going to say that Aesop's Fables are speciest, toxic and unrelatable because so many characters are animals? Because that is what your argument is.
I mean, I'm fine with mixed or all female regiments for the simple reason that I think it adds to the grimdark.
The idea of a state that throws everyone into the meat grinder equally out of sheer indifference is deliciously grimdark and ironic.
To paraphrase a certain gunnery sergeant :
"I do not look down on men, women, ratlings or ogryn. Here you're all equally worthless"
CthuluIsSpy wrote: I mean, I'm fine with mixed or all female regiments for the simple reason that I think it adds to the grimdark.
The idea of a state that throws everyone into the meat grinder equally out of sheer indifference is deliciously grimdark and ironic.
To paraphrase a certain gunnery sergeant :
"I do not look down on men, women, ratlings or ogryn. Here you're all equally worthless"
Even if you have standards where men are going to out perform women, how high is the bar? If the average man is at 6, and the average woman is at 5, does it mater if the guard only needs you at 3?
Sure, they would prefer an army full of 10s, but they get what they get and use them.
Welcome to the guard, here is your lasgun and flack vest. Go die for the Imperium.
Even a world with slightly higher gravity than Earth is going to produce stronger people.
We can also look to the Leagues of Votann once again to get an idea of just how rare a human like you or I might be.
See, the Kin aren’t the result of natural evolution. Oh no. Each and everyone is a custom job, gene edited by the Votann according to predicted or established need.
An entire race, billions strong, all genecrafted to some degree.
Now, I’ll be the first to say “that doesn’t mean all Abhumans are the result of the same at some point in their past”. But, it does raise the distinct possibility. And this is somewhat supported by House Goliath (a genetically crafted slave race, who may in fact be Abhumans, depending on who you ask).
And those are just the species and sub-species where such genetic tinkering is manifest and obvious. But it also shows such practice was likely widespread, and inherent to any colony that had a STC.
It also makes some level of sense. If you find a planet largely hospitable, but with higher gravity? No need to wait for the people to adapt the ol’ fashioned way. Oh no. Hook them up and edit dem genes.
High Gravity? Increase muscle mass and bone density to compensate. Less than optimal oxygen content? Maybe increase lung capacity or efficiency.
In time, you end up with a highly modified but now baseline human species. And as they travel off world, those edits intermingle, and the carefully selected traits begin to be passed on the ol’ fashioned way. And, provided the results are beneficial? Edits made 5, 6, 7, 8,000 years ago could very well be considered the norm within the Imperium.*
And so, we simply can’t point to modern humans and say “Imperial citizens would be the same”. Because that’s not what 39,000 or so years of stellar exploration and genetic tinkering would result in.
Add in a total lack of health and safety, and we can’t rule out food is regularly supplemented with steroids or similar to increase the strength of your population to ensure they are as efficient as possible at whatever manual labour they’re involved in.
Finally? It’s a completely different culture when it comes to taboos and that. It’s still relatively recently in western history that women have been allowed to serve. The Imperium, not taking into account the pre-Crusade era(s) has had a 10,000 year tradition of “if you can hold a gun, we’ll find a place for you”, entirely regardless of gender or colour or any of the other odd little taboos the modern world has.
*Another poster on another thread suggested this could explain why mankind is so prone to spontaneous mutation. Essentially there’s been so much genhancement over the years, not all mix well with each other, and our genome is fundamentally breached because of that. So it’s not necessarily going to be the Warp.
It is probably more like the average man is a 6, a woman a 4 and they need a 7 or 8. Just like in real life. A very fit woman or an above average fit man could reach the standard.
Just like in real life. If the quality of the soldiers is too low it isn't even worth it to equip or train them. Even if life is cheap, training, equipment and transport isn't as cheap.
Like there are minimum requirements for IQ for american soldiers since if it is too low they become a detriment rather than an asset. Even if it might seem like a guardsman just need to die with a lasgun in hand to be useful the Imperium probably expect those guardsmen to be useful in more important operations in those cases they aren't instantly vaporized. If they can only arm and transport a limited amount of soldiers then they would want those soldiers to have some standard or it would be a waste of valuable resources.
Anything that make women stronger and better soldiers in the 40k universe than modern earth is probably also making men stronger and better soldiers too. With a better starting point it could even be argued that they the difference in performance is even higher, rather than lower, in the Imperium. Without more detailed information we can't really assume much.
Not really. The important part is rather the difference than the absolute values.
Women and men grow muscle at close to the same speed if you measure it in % from the amount of muscle they started with. The difference is that men have much higher body mass and a higher % of muscle compared to women so even though both men and women might add 1% of muscle each month the men are adding twice or more in absolute body mass in the same time period.
40k women might be better suited as soldiers than most men in our world. But that doesn't mean that they are equal to 40k men. Unless only women "improves" men should as well.
Men might have a lot of advantages when it comes to physical performance but that doesn't mean that men are superior to women overall. It isn't just muscle mass or endurance but the structure of bones, reaction speed and temperament. Men have worse colour perception but can estimate depth and speed better instead. One is more useful in one circumstance while the other more useful in another. Do 40k women have the same bone structure, eyes, body size, temperament and hormones running through them as the men so they can now compete physically as equals? Is that even making for better representation if the women now are 100% the same as men if we disregard which sex gives birth. Not sure if that is the way we want to go.
The problem rather stems from 40k being so war focused that the areas that women more naturally excel in are in the background. Perhaps GW should rather flesh out the world building a bit more and have less focus on the war aspect and give us more insight into the everyday life and machinations of the imperium. Give women more of a chance to be seen without making them more like men.
40k is a setting in which chainswords are viable weapons. It doesn't care about realism and all these biology related arguments are at best missing the point.
That being said all female regiments are already a thing in the lore so... I don't quite get the point of the OP.
Klickor wrote:It is probably more like the average man is a 6, a woman a 4 and they need a 7 or 8. Just like in real life.
Those are completely arbitrary numbers, and that's not even getting into: 1. Different standards of living across the Imperium 2. Societies which have vastly different cultures which affect recruitment (a population where women are trained in combat from an early age, for example) 3. The recruiting standards for an Imperial Guard regiment (which are notoriously unstandardised and frankly impossible to compare to "real life". After all, in real life, we don't have anything like the Salvar Chem-Dogs, do we?)
A very fit woman or an above average fit man could reach the standard.
Again, what standard? You don't know it. I don't know it. But there's absolutely no reason or evidence to believe that it's in any way comparable to what we know in the modern day, or even in a historical sense. 40k just ain't built for that.
Just like in real life.
We're not talking real life though. Because 40k is so drastically different from real life that it's not worth comparing. This is a setting where apparently humanity's greatest asset is it's vast uncounted armies, but apparently sends less troops than WWI to Armageddon.
If the quality of the soldiers is too low it isn't even worth it to equip or train them. Even if life is cheap, training, equipment and transport isn't as cheap.
If the transport's already going to that planet, and it's already loaded with armour and guns, and you already have training staff on the ship, you'll pick up whoever marches onto that ship if they're good enough. Having an army of soldiers you might not have expected is better than having an empty ship and not even any cannon fodder to feed to the enemy guns.
Like there are minimum requirements for IQ for american soldiers since if it is too low they become a detriment rather than an asset. Even if it might seem like a guardsman just need to die with a lasgun in hand to be useful the Imperium probably expect those guardsmen to be useful in more important operations in those cases they aren't instantly vaporized. If they can only arm and transport a limited amount of soldiers then they would want those soldiers to have some standard or it would be a waste of valuable resources.
Again, 40k isn't reality. You're looking at this from the lens of real world logics and standards. Forget that. The Imperium *doesn't care*. It doesn't need to. You seem to be under the impression that there's a limit on how many guardsmen they can transport, when it's more likely the other way around - too few transports for all the guardsmen they can recruit.
Anything that make women stronger and better soldiers in the 40k universe than modern earth is probably also making men stronger and better soldiers too. With a better starting point it could even be argued that they the difference in performance is even higher, rather than lower, in the Imperium. Without more detailed information we can't really assume much.
And yet you're assuming that the Imperium is operating under many of the logics that underpin modern militaries. What happened to "we can't really assume much"?
Here's the actual facts of the situation. The Imperium recruits women. In nearly all branches of the Imperium, women are recruited into the same positions as men: for labour, for admin, and for everything in between. We have no indication of a set standard that is either enforced, galactically applicable, or even what that standard of recruiting looks like. We have no idea how capable the Imperium (as a whole) expects its cannon fodder to be. We also know that the Imperium famously does not care massively about loss of life, and that it considers its considerable manpower to be one of it's greatest assets. We know for a fact that all-women regiments exist, just the same as all-men. We also know mixed-sex regiments exist.
Evidence suggests that if there is a standard of recruiting, women frequently surpass it. It also suggests that the Imperium doesn't care all that much about the preservation of the lives of its soldiers, irrespective of sex. These factors combined imply that the Imperium likely has very little distinguishing between who gets shipped off to die, so long as they meet some arbitrarily and sketchily defined standard, a standard which is clearly passable for entire regiments of women to be recruited.
Klickor wrote:Give women more of a chance to be seen without making them more like men.
Why would it be a problem if they were?
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Tyran wrote: 40k is a setting in which chainswords are viable weapons. It doesn't care about realism and all these biology related arguments are at best missing the point.
That being said all female regiments are already a thing in the lore so... I don't quite get the point of the OP.
Nor do I. This feels a lot like people ignoring some very clearly stated aspects, or trying to sweep them under some sort of rug.
Not directly related, but I just recalled that in one of the arbites novels, a psyker tries to psychically attack a high-ranking arbite by making her think she's in an alternate version of her life where she's clumsy and out of shape, and her response is to start doing some exercises.
It's neither the guard nor even "reality." However, the implication is that a scenario where an arbite could be notably clumsy and out of shape (iirc I think the text may have suggested that she was a little pudgy in this scenario) was considered realistic to not be immediately illusion-shattering. I know that some specialized arbites have desk jobs, but I still feel like your average low-ranking arbite (which is what she was in this scenario) would still need to meet certain physical requirements. I'd be kind of surprised if those requirements weren't at least in the same ballpark as the requirements for the guard.
So if we're comfortable assuming arbites have requirements similar to the guard, and if being clumsy and out of shape isn't a disqualifier for being an arbites, then a reasonably in-shape woman probably meets the requirements for being in the guard.
Like there are minimum requirements for IQ for american soldiers since if it is too low they become a detriment rather than an asset.
Incorrect. The ASVAB test is not an IQ test, it is designed to test your skills to determine what service you are best suited for. It is an aptitude test, not a test to try and evaluate general intelligence.
Also, the Coast Guard has the highest required score out of all the branches of the US military for arithmetic reasoning, math knowledge, and verbal expression.
Without more detailed information we can't really assume much.
This is hilarious considering your very first sentence was this assumption:
It is probably more like the average man is a 6, a woman a 4 and they need a 7 or 8. Just like in real life. A very fit woman or an above average fit man could reach the standard.
Also, citation needed for pretty much your whole post.
Wyldhunt wrote: Not directly related, but I just recalled that in one of the arbites novels, a psyker tries to psychically attack a high-ranking arbite by making her think she's in an alternate version of her life where she's clumsy and out of shape, and her response is to start doing some exercises.
It's neither the guard nor even "reality." However, the implication is that a scenario where an arbite could be notably clumsy and out of shape (iirc I think the text may have suggested that she was a little pudgy in this scenario) was considered realistic to not be immediately illusion-shattering. I know that some specialized arbites have desk jobs, but I still feel like your average low-ranking arbite (which is what she was in this scenario) would still need to meet certain physical requirements. I'd be kind of surprised if those requirements weren't at least in the same ballpark as the requirements for the guard.
So if we're comfortable assuming arbites have requirements similar to the guard, and if being clumsy and out of shape isn't a disqualifier for being an arbites, then a reasonably in-shape woman probably meets the requirements for being in the guard.
Worth remembering that like the Adeptus Sororitas, Commissariat and Storm Troopers? The Adeptus Arbites (so not local law enforcement often referred to as Arbites) recruit from the Schola Progenium. Whilst not exactly “slap up feeds”, those growing up in that August Institution are very well fed (nutrient dense) and trained from childhood physically and mentally.
Also interesting to note that in Cain’s opinion, those assigned to the Storm Troopers/Tempestus Scions are those not smart enough for other branches. Whether that opinion holds any weight in entirely up to you!
So if we're comfortable assuming arbites have requirements similar to the guard, and if being clumsy and out of shape isn't a disqualifier for being an arbites, then a reasonably in-shape woman probably meets the requirements for being in the guard.
Makes sense I suppose.
If you think about it, the reason why we have military standards isn't just for combat effectiveness, but so those recruits don't just immediately die and have a good chance of coming back alive.
The Imperium doesn't care that much about the latter and they tend to take a quantity over quality approach to warfare, so I wouldn't be surprised if their recruitment standards are much lower compared to ours overall.
Grey Templar wrote: Given that the majority of the characters in any of the novels with the IG are male(not just named characters, all people in a novel period)
I suppose you must also think the vast majority of Space Marines are Ultramarines, Space Wolves, and Black Templars?
and extrapolating from real world compositions of military forces throughout history I am confidant that it is the case. It is on you to provide sources saying they are not.
So the answer is no, right? You don't have a source for your assertion, and as such it can be discarded wholesale, correct?
Grey Templar wrote: Given that the majority of the characters in any of the novels with the IG are male(not just named characters, all people in a novel period)
I suppose you must also think the vast majority of Space Marines are Ultramarines, Space Wolves, and Black Templars?
and extrapolating from real world compositions of military forces throughout history I am confidant that it is the case. It is on you to provide sources saying they are not.
So the answer is no, right? You don't have a source for your assertion, and as such it can be discarded wholesale, correct?
Good talk.
Thats the thing. My position is backed up by the real world, and absent of information directly contradicting it that 40k is different we can extrapolate. Doubly so since 40k is supposed to be our world 40k years in the future.
Again, you must provide evidence that things have changed. Not some vague assertion that "they must have changed".
Its like you asserting that the Gravitational Constant is somehow different in 40k than it is IRL. We'd need evidence that gravity has changed in 40k for you to assert that, I wouldn't need evidence to say that gravity is unchanged.
The real world is the baseline assumption. Changes only exist where they explicitly or implicitly say they have changed. Nothing explicitly says that humanity's sexual dimorphism, be it biological, psychological, or societal, has changed. And there is plenty of evidence that it remains. The Adeptus Sororitas's very existence actually suggests that there are still defined gender roles and expectations, because otherwise the loophole that enables their existence wouldn't exist. The Ecclesiarchy wouldn't have made the argument and the Imperium wouldn't have accepted it.
Incorrect. The ASVAB test is not an IQ test, it is designed to test your skills to determine what service you are best suited for. It is an aptitude test, not a test to try and evaluate general intelligence.
It isn't an IQ test but you could kinda convert the results from it into one and if you are below 80-83 IQ, somewhere around there, you won't be able to get a good enough grade on the ASVAB test to pass. So there are indirectly a minimum IQ requirement and most people know what IQ is so for the sake of discussion it is a more useful metric to use.
Btw, if I need citations for my posts that is mostly based on our own reality and assuming 40k is working the same unless directly contradicted then I would love to see you demand citations on everyone else that out of thin air assume the differences between the sexes is smaller in the far future and that it could be almost a 50% representation of women in the imperial guard. I would love to see those sources.
In my guess it is probably single digit % women in the imperial guard. Not rare nor a small number in total when considering the size of the Imperium. Some worlds have way more women than others but in general I don't see why it wouldn't be like in our world that men, for many many reasons, make up the vast majority of soldiers in ground combat roles. In the entire war machine if we include logistics then it could easily be much closer to a 50/50 split. Even if men were to join or get drafted at a higher rate they would also suffer a disproportionate amount of casualties in combat while support and logistics which most likely have a higher ratio of women wouldn't.
Have you considered that having things be exactly like our reality is boring as hell?
Or that people arguing so ardently that women shouldn't have equal representation to men in a fictional setting where it had been stated multiple times that there is a much greater sense of equality due to the uncaring and cruel nature of the ruling human government is contradictory the the background and continues to foster the idea that Warhammer is a "boys club"?
You can throw around "logic" and "reality" all you want but if all you can do to prove your points is use IRL examples to claim a fictional setting with circumstances massively and almost impossible different to modern Earth goes by your way of thinking then sorry but that's just silly.
I think 40k is quite interesting as it is and that a lot of things are also the same as in our world deepens it and thus make the differences that do exist feel more real.
I don't think Warhammer is a "boys club". I don't really think wanting or not wanting more female cannon fodder is a good metric on if people think the hobby itself should be for boys only. Dying in battles in war is perhaps a "boy activity" but I don't see the need for it to be more equal. Depending on how you view it it can be seen as quite messed up and misogynistic to want more suffering women.
Wanting to change a fictional IP to be different just to fit your own personal ideal world view or politics is even more silly. You say it is very different than our modern world, and I do agree to that, but only in a way you want it to. But! There isn't anything that points that those differences really works in the way you want it to. It could equally be in the opposite direction since we don't know.
I personally wouldn't really care if the background changes a bit and it would turn in that direction. In some ways it is more grimdark if more women are thrown into the meat grinder of constant war. But we don't have that background, yet.
Incorrect. The ASVAB test is not an IQ test, it is designed to test your skills to determine what service you are best suited for. It is an aptitude test, not a test to try and evaluate general intelligence.
It isn't an IQ test but you could kinda convert the results from it into one and if you are below 80-83 IQ, somewhere around there, you won't be able to get a good enough grade on the ASVAB test to pass. So there are indirectly a minimum IQ requirement and most people know what IQ is so for the sake of discussion it is a more useful metric to use.
No, you can't, because it is not what the test is measuring. Any attempt to try and convert it into an IQ test is pure junk science.
Why not? Does it matter what the test measures if the minimum requirements to pass it correlates directly to another measurement more people understand?
I never said they did an IQ test for soldiers but there is a minimum IQ needed to be a soldier. Without sufficient IQ/intelligence you won't be able to understand or pass the test even if none of the actual things tested are stuff that show up in a normal IQ test. How well you do on the test isn't necessarily correlated to IQ but it will weed out those who are too low.
If you need 70 IQ (made up number) to fire a gun in the right direction and they test if a person can follow the instruction to do that correctly and they need to be able to do that to pass then there is a 70 IQ minimum to pass. If you need 100 IQ to be able to pass all the things required of you to be a pilot then the minimum IQ needed is 100. But just because you have 100 IQ won't mean that you are suitable for being a pilot.
Like if you need to be a certain weight/mass for something then you could also use height to weed out a lot of people without having them step on a scale. If too short then they are too light and if they are too tall then they will be too heavy. But even if within the minimum and maximum height you still would need to have enough of your weight be muscle for example or have some other skills. In practice you have put a height requirement despite mostly looking for a certain amount of (muscle) mass. Which is what I did with using IQ.
To add a specific reference relating to possibly the most well known (out of universe) all female Regiment:
...the 296th [Valhallan]; a rear echelon garrison command, which, just to throw promethium on the flames, was one of the few all-women regiments raised and maintained by that desolate iceball'.
For The Emperor in Ciaphas Cain: Hero of the Imperium, pg.38
Grey Templar wrote:My position is backed up by the real world, and absent of information directly contradicting it that 40k is different we can extrapolate. Doubly so since 40k is supposed to be our world 40k years in the future.
Again, you must provide evidence that things have changed. Not some vague assertion that "they must have changed".
Its like you asserting that the Gravitational Constant is somehow different in 40k than it is IRL. We'd need evidence that gravity has changed in 40k for you to assert that, I wouldn't need evidence to say that gravity is unchanged.
The real world is the baseline assumption. Changes only exist where they explicitly or implicitly say they have changed. Nothing explicitly says that humanity's sexual dimorphism, be it biological, psychological, or societal, has changed. And there is plenty of evidence that it remains. The Adeptus Sororitas's very existence actually suggests that there are still defined gender roles and expectations, because otherwise the loophole that enables their existence wouldn't exist. The Ecclesiarchy wouldn't have made the argument and the Imperium wouldn't have accepted it.
Klickor wrote:Btw, if I need citations for my posts that is mostly based on our own reality and assuming 40k is working the same unless directly contradicted then I would love to see you demand citations on everyone else that out of thin air assume the differences between the sexes is smaller in the far future and that it could be almost a 50% representation of women in the imperial guard. I would love to see those sources.
That's the problem. You're basing your arguments in reality, and that's just not how 40k works. This is a setting where the chainsword is considered a fully valid weapon. Where's your sources that chainswords function any different to reality? Or are we just accepting "okay, that's a thing, cool"?
Jumping back to Templar's comment about the gravitational constant changing - I mean, it surely must have? Otherwise, how you explain Titans functioning? Or Space Marine aircraft? Better to assume that "if GW say it's a thing, it's a thing, and don't try thinking about logic".
And actually, we have PLENTY to suggest the Imperium's attitudes to sex/gender are different. There is no restriction visible on women as HLOT. The Sororitas are only all women because of a legal loophole brought on by the misuse of gendered language. They're not recruited because "we don't normally have women soldiers!!", they're recruited because the Imperium used the archaic term "men-at-arms". Does that imply the Imperium also doesn't have non-binary soldiers, because they said "men-at-arms"? Patently false, as a majority of Admech characters that GW have written lately are non-binary.
Again, lets look at the *facts* - all women regiments exist. In GW's own model range, we're seeing femme-presenting faces and bodies in the Guard. In their written material, we're seeing a wealth of women in the Imperial Guard. None of this suggests that it's THAT hard or unusual for women to be in the Imperial Guard.
Meanwhile, I want to see your assertions on why women wouldn't be so present - using only the logics presented in 40k. No real world logic, no arguments based on what *we* currently experience - unless you want to then argue why chainswords are present, or why Titans don't just crumple under their own weight.
Klickor wrote:I think 40k is quite interesting as it is and that a lot of things are also the same as in our world deepens it and thus make the differences that do exist feel more real.
So, women need to only be in single-digit percentages of the guard, or 40k doesn't feel real? We can have orks, daemons, and chainsaw swords, but women being 10% present in the famously utilitarian, uncaring, and meatgrinder-ish Imperial Guard would make 40k less interesting and unrealistic?
I don't think Warhammer is a "boys club". I don't really think wanting or not wanting more female cannon fodder is a good metric on if people think the hobby itself should be for boys only. Dying in battles in war is perhaps a "boy activity" but I don't see the need for it to be more equal. Depending on how you view it it can be seen as quite messed up and misogynistic to want more suffering women.
Pardon, but what?? It's "misogynistic" that women go through the same warfare that men do in 40k?? What next, it's misandrist that male guardsmen get sent off to die? Who gets recruited then? Non-binaries? That's enby-phobic. Agender people? Also discriminatory. What on earth is that sort of logic - "you shouldn't want women guardsmen, because you just want women to die and suffer"?
I'm not saying that's necessarily YOUR argument, but whoever is making that argument should be ridiculed. That's truly nonsensical.
Wanting to change a fictional IP to be different just to fit your own personal ideal world view or politics is even more silly. You say it is very different than our modern world, and I do agree to that, but only in a way you want it to. But! There isn't anything that points that those differences really works in the way you want it to. It could equally be in the opposite direction since we don't know.
Women existing isn't political. And, yes, it IS very different to our modern world, BECAUSE IT IS. See again: fungi monsters, psychic powers, daemons, and chainswords.
Meanwhile, the ACTUAL FACTS of the setting say that women are clearly around enough that they show up in nearly all guardsmen stories, have entire mono-sex regiments, and this is never remarked on as unusual. So, actually - there's PLENTY that points to those different as being how we're describing. There's absolutely no evidence on your end that it works in the opposite direction, unless you use real world logic, which, as we've pointed out, is stupid in 40k.
I personally wouldn't really care if the background changes a bit and it would turn in that direction. In some ways it is more grimdark if more women are thrown into the meat grinder of constant war. But we don't have that background, yet.
Yes, we do. We literally *have* background of all-women regiments. We *have* multiple models of women guardsmen. We *have* a plethora of women guardsmen, who aren't marked out as being "unusual" for being women.
On the contrary, we don't have any background that suggests that women suffer to a dramatic degree of not being able to be recruited into the Guard. The only argument you've made for that has come from the Real World, not the background.
Now, if you want to argue that the background should be changed, and that it's also still an arbitrary creation, and that women SHOULDN'T be able to be recruited, you can certainly try.
Klickor wrote: Why not? Does it matter what the test measures if the minimum requirements to pass it correlates directly to another measurement more people understand?
I never said they did an IQ test for soldiers but there is a minimum IQ needed to be a soldier. Without sufficient IQ/intelligence you won't be able to understand or pass the test even if none of the actual things tested are stuff that show up in a normal IQ test. How well you do on the test isn't necessarily correlated to IQ but it will weed out those who are too low.
If you need 70 IQ (made up number) to fire a gun in the right direction and they test if a person can follow the instruction to do that correctly and they need to be able to do that to pass then there is a 70 IQ minimum to pass. If you need 100 IQ to be able to pass all the things required of you to be a pilot then the minimum IQ needed is 100. But just because you have 100 IQ won't mean that you are suitable for being a pilot.
Like if you need to be a certain weight/mass for something then you could also use height to weed out a lot of people without having them step on a scale. If too short then they are too light and if they are too tall then they will be too heavy. But even if within the minimum and maximum height you still would need to have enough of your weight be muscle for example or have some other skills. In practice you have put a height requirement despite mostly looking for a certain amount of (muscle) mass. Which is what I did with using IQ.
Er... Because tests measuring different things are not typically comparable and often do not correlate reliably. Transfering between scores is extremely difficult to do scientifically and requires large sample sizes to do reliably. It also requires comparable populations.
IQ as a measure is fraught with issues, not least that it is not solely innate on existing tests and practice and familiarity improve scores. But the military test is not trying to derive some kind of underlying general intelligence level, it is looking at a person's capabilities in specific areas at the time of taking the test.
Gert wrote: Have you considered that having things be exactly like our reality is boring as hell?
Or that people arguing so ardently that women shouldn't have equal representation to men in a fictional setting where it had been stated multiple times that there is a much greater sense of equality due to the uncaring and cruel nature of the ruling human government is contradictory the the background and continues to foster the idea that Warhammer is a "boys club"?
Its not exactly like our reality, there is other stuff in the setting that is different. If the fact that it conforms to our reality in a specific area makes it suddenly boring for you, well that is your problem not the settings.
Equal opportunity doesn't mean equal representation. Again, nobody is saying "Icky, no girls allowed!". We are saying that 40k human society still has the same gender norms distribution as our real world, with variation from planet to planet of course. Are there any specific rules preventing women from doing specific tasks within the Imperium as a general rule? No, but there clearly are still systemic biological and social customs which would result in fewer women in the Imperial guard.
In the real world, women are just inherently less likely to choose to serve in any armed forces outside of places where service for everybody is mandatory. But even in places which have universal conscription, men make up the clear majority of the armed forces. Because very few women choose to either volunteer or continue on past any mandatory service. This is something not in society's control, but just how women behave and make choices. Again, to say that this has changed by the time of 40k would need direct evidence.
And that is what equality actually looks like. Equal opportunity doesn't mean you'll have equal representation, it just means people are allowed to freely choose. And people don't choose purely randomly. The only way you could get a 50/50 split would be if someone was arbitrarily forcing it to be 50/50, either via quota or by a truly random selection method with no exceptions being granted(highly unlikely).
You can throw around "logic" and "reality" all you want but if all you can do to prove your points is use IRL examples to claim a fictional setting with circumstances massively and almost impossible different to modern Earth goes by your way of thinking then sorry but that's just silly.
Yes, the person arguing using logic and reality itself is being silly... Not the guy saying that "Its a fictional setting, so it MUST be different from reality in every way"
Again, you seem to have forgotten that warhammer is set in our worlds future. This means we have a lot of baseline assumptions built into the world building of the setting. Namely that the humans in the setting are humans, like from the real world. The various laws of physics work as IRL too, except where bent and changed thanks to future technology/space magic.
Any fantasy world or universe carries over baseline assumptions from reality, otherwise the fictional setting would be devoid of any coherency.
None of the circumstances that are different in 40k suggest that they have completely abandoned the natural human tendancy for men to mostly be the sex that goes to war. They don't prevent women from going to war, but they certainly won't be enforcing any sort of pairity. Just letting the chips fall where they may. And history and reality in the real world would suggest that this would result in a majority male armed forces, with room for potential exceptions here and there. This is also backed up by what few glimpses we have of normal imperial society, along with the existence of the Adeptes Sororitas*
*To repeat myself, the fact that the Sororitas is notable for being all female and is so for a very specific reason reinforces the idea that there are still gender roles in Imperial society. Are these roles loose and breaking them is not considered taboo? Yeah, obviously since we do have many notable female characters in Imperial society and military forces at high stations and nobody makes a big deal about it.
You can still have a norm that most people follow and not have society consider that breaking it to be taboo or unusual.
Lord Damocles wrote: To add a specific reference relating to possibly the most well known (out of universe) all female Regiment:
...the 296th [Valhallan]; a rear echelon garrison command, which, just to throw promethium on the flames, was one of the few all-women regiments raised and maintained by that desolate iceball'.
For The Emperor in Ciaphas Cain: Hero of the Imperium, pg.38
The questions raised from that is: does that imply that Valhalla raises few all-women regiments, or that the Imperium raises few all-women regiments? The language is ambiguous as to if this is relegated to Valhalla or the wider Imperium.
Lord Damocles wrote: To add a specific reference relating to possibly the most well known (out of universe) all female Regiment:
...the 296th [Valhallan]; a rear echelon garrison command, which, just to throw promethium on the flames, was one of the few all-women regiments raised and maintained by that desolate iceball'.
For The Emperor in Ciaphas Cain: Hero of the Imperium, pg.38
The questions raised from that is: does that imply that Valhalla raises few all-women regiments, or that the Imperium raises few all-women regiments? The language is ambiguous as to if this is relegated to Valhalla or the wider Imperium.
I think that sentence reads quite specifically as referring to Valhalla alone, not the Imperium at large. Apparently Valhalla (according to Cain) also does not raise mixed-sex regiments.
Grey Templar wrote:We are saying that 40k human society still has the same gender norms distribution as our real world, with variation from planet to planet of course. Are there any specific rules preventing women from doing specific tasks within the Imperium as a general rule? No, but there clearly are still systemic biological and social customs which would result in fewer women in the Imperial guard.
... except there aren't - "with variation from planet to planet, of course".
I mean, that's a massive cop-out, because EVERYTHING in the Imperium is varied from planet to planet! You might as well be arguing the exact opposite, because the Imperium simply doesn't really have a standardised response - which, actually, in term, makes the Imperium pretty blind to issues of gender, sex, and race. Again, look at the HLOT - plenty of women. Look at the existence of the wealth of women serving in the guard - who aren't remarked on as unusual for being women.
You say the Imperium has the same gender norms distribution, but there's no proof of that beyond you assuming so. And that's without even getting into the massive gaping hole in your logic that "variation from planet to planet" represents, which torpedoes the idea that there is even a common "40k human society"!
In the real world, women are just inherently less likely to choose to serve in any armed forces outside of places where service for everybody is mandatory... Again, to say that this has changed by the time of 40k would need direct evidence.
WE HAVE IT. All women regiments, women models being integrated in the standard Cadian boxes, no characters remarking on women guardsmen being unusual.
And that is what equality actually looks like. Equal opportunity doesn't mean you'll have equal representation, it just means people are allowed to freely choose. And people don't choose purely randomly. The only way you could get a 50/50 split would be if someone was arbitrarily forcing it to be 50/50, either via quota or by a truly random selection method with no exceptions being granted(highly unlikely).
You can throw around "logic" and "reality" all you want but if all you can do to prove your points is use IRL examples to claim a fictional setting with circumstances massively and almost impossible different to modern Earth goes by your way of thinking then sorry but that's just silly.
Yes, the person arguing using logic and reality itself is being silly... Not the guy saying that "Its a fictional setting, so it MUST be different from reality in every way"
Unironically, yes. Because the logic and reality you're argument from simply *aren't present in 40k*. All the while ignoring the in-universe logics and realities presented that say that "women guardsmen isn't unusual".
Again, you seem to have forgotten that warhammer is set in our worlds future. This means we have a lot of baseline assumptions built into the world building of the setting.
Yes, assumptions which are quickly disproven by women guardsmen not being seen as unusual in the setting.
Namely that the humans in the setting are humans, like from the real world.
Ignoring that 40k has MULTIPLE worlds then.
The various laws of physics work as IRL too, except where bent and changed thanks to future technology/space magic.
So, the laws of physics DON'T work as IRL then. Good to know.
Any fantasy world or universe carries over baseline assumptions from reality, otherwise the fictional setting would be devoid of any coherency.
That's simply not true though. Coherency comes from INTERNAL congruency, not its ability to mirror ours.
*To repeat myself, the fact that the Sororitas is notable for being all female and is so for a very specific reason reinforces the idea that there are still gender roles in Imperial society. Are these roles loose and breaking them is not considered taboo? Yeah, obviously since we do have many notable female characters in Imperial society and military forces at high stations and nobody makes a big deal about it.
Sisters are notable for being all female because they're a loophole of archaic language, not because the Imperium doesn't employ female soldiers - and the Imperium went along with it, because it's known for being hidebound by archaic language and dogma, not because it's institutionally sexist. In a sensible world, the Imperium never uses the term "men-at-arms", because it's an anachronism - but the Imperium isn't sensible.
And, remember - Sisters of Battle were the Brides of the Emperor first, and still mono-gender.
Lord Damocles wrote: To add a specific reference relating to possibly the most well known (out of universe) all female Regiment:
...the 296th [Valhallan]; a rear echelon garrison command, which, just to throw promethium on the flames, was one of the few all-women regiments raised and maintained by that desolate iceball'.
For The Emperor in Ciaphas Cain: Hero of the Imperium, pg.38
The questions raised from that is: does that imply that Valhalla raises few all-women regiments, or that the Imperium raises few all-women regiments? The language is ambiguous as to if this is relegated to Valhalla or the wider Imperium.
I think that sentence reads quite specifically as referring to Valhalla alone, not the Imperium at large. Apparently Valhalla (according to Cain) also does not raise mixed-sex regiments.
Agreed, that's how I see it too. And hell, Valhalla might be a world that *doesn't* have many women soldiers in it! And that would be totally fine - because the Imperium isn't a monolithic organisation. For each Valhalla that doesn't have many women soldiers, we have Cadias, Catachans, and Mordians.
Again, you seem to have forgotten that warhammer is set in our worlds future. This means we have a lot of baseline assumptions built into the world building of the setting. Namely that the humans in the setting are humans, like from the real world. The various laws of physics work as IRL too, except where bent and changed thanks to future technology/space magic.
Go back just 120 years and the idea of women serving in the armed forces at all was not a thing; women weren't even allowed in most industries! Go back about 2-300 and women were considered inferior in MANY ways. They couldn't do advanced mathematics; they couldn't do industry work; they couldn't fight in the armed forces. All those things were impossible for women to do. The 100% physically and mentally same women we have today (because that time span for humans is way to short to have vast genetic changes).
In just a few hundred years our attitudes have shifted insanely dramatically.
40K is set tens of thousands of years in the future. It's mindbogglingly far into our future that society today should not define it at all. Society today isn't defined by cavemen societies .
Heck lets ignore the fact that even today we have multiple different societies with very different social attitudes. In some countries homosexuality is still illegal; in others its legal. In some women cannot leave the house without covering up entirely; in others they can go down to a beach bikini. That's all present today in the world we live in. Social and cultural attitudes vary a lot and that's in 1 time span on 1 planet full of humans in numbers below that of single Hive cities in the 40K setting
Grey Templar wrote:My position is backed up by the real world, and absent of information directly contradicting it that 40k is different we can extrapolate. Doubly so since 40k is supposed to be our world 40k years in the future.
Again, you must provide evidence that things have changed. Not some vague assertion that "they must have changed".
Its like you asserting that the Gravitational Constant is somehow different in 40k than it is IRL. We'd need evidence that gravity has changed in 40k for you to assert that, I wouldn't need evidence to say that gravity is unchanged.
The real world is the baseline assumption. Changes only exist where they explicitly or implicitly say they have changed. Nothing explicitly says that humanity's sexual dimorphism, be it biological, psychological, or societal, has changed. And there is plenty of evidence that it remains. The Adeptus Sororitas's very existence actually suggests that there are still defined gender roles and expectations, because otherwise the loophole that enables their existence wouldn't exist. The Ecclesiarchy wouldn't have made the argument and the Imperium wouldn't have accepted it.
Klickor wrote:Btw, if I need citations for my posts that is mostly based on our own reality and assuming 40k is working the same unless directly contradicted then I would love to see you demand citations on everyone else that out of thin air assume the differences between the sexes is smaller in the far future and that it could be almost a 50% representation of women in the imperial guard. I would love to see those sources.
That's the problem. You're basing your arguments in reality, and that's just not how 40k works. This is a setting where the chainsword is considered a fully valid weapon. Where's your sources that chainswords function any different to reality? Or are we just accepting "okay, that's a thing, cool"?
Jumping back to Templar's comment about the gravitational constant changing - I mean, it surely must have? Otherwise, how you explain Titans functioning? Or Space Marine aircraft? Better to assume that "if GW say it's a thing, it's a thing, and don't try thinking about logic".
Again, lets look at the *facts* - all women regiments exist. In GW's own model range, we're seeing femme-presenting faces and bodies in the Guard. In their written material, we're seeing a wealth of women in the Imperial Guard. None of this suggests that it's THAT hard or unusual for women to be in the Imperial Guard.
Meanwhile, I want to see your assertions on why women wouldn't be so present - using only the logics presented in 40k. No real world logic, no arguments based on what *we* currently experience - unless you want to then argue why chainswords are present, or why Titans don't just crumple under their own weight.
Your chainsword analogy is dumb. Here is why.
The chainsword works in the setting, chainsaws would be terrible weapons IRL. The contradition is covered by "space technology/magic". Same with gravity. Gravity is the same, but technology has allowed for the cheating of gravity.
Women's role in the Imperial armed forces is not contradicted by anything in the setting. You are completely misrepresenting our argument, and being incredibly stupid in saying that Real world examples are invalid.
The existence of female characters and all female regiments doesn't contradict the assertion that in the Imperial guard as a whole men make up the majority(based on the real world and how human societies function historically and presently). In fact, the existence of an All-female regiment would suggest that, in the same way that the existence and special nature of the Adeptus Sororitas does, those sort of regiments are rarer. Rare but not uncommon and nobody thinks it is strange or such within the setting.
And actually, we have PLENTY to suggest the Imperium's attitudes to sex/gender are different. There is no restriction visible on women as HLOT. The Sororitas are only all women because of a legal loophole brought on by the misuse of gendered language. They're not recruited because "we don't normally have women soldiers!!", they're recruited because the Imperium used the archaic term "men-at-arms". Does that imply the Imperium also doesn't have non-binary soldiers, because they said "men-at-arms"? Patently false, as a majority of Admech characters that GW have written lately are non-binary.
The fact that legal loophole exists within Imperial legal precedent is predicated on there being a difference. If the Imperium was truly a post-gender society in every way then nobody would have noticed the loophole at all. Men-at-arms would have been viewed with the rules as intended reading and not the rules as written. Men-at-arms would be read to clearly mean human soldier, not male soldier specifically. Heck, the continued existence of gendered language at all suggests that it still matters to some people in-universe, even if only on a subconscious level.
Take a step back and read what we are actually saying,
We are saying that there are no specific blockages against women in Imperial society. However, biology still would assert itself upon human behavior and choices. This would result in the same effects we see on modern military force compositions in countries where there is gender equality. The US military has no barriers to women joining and is an all volunteer force, its still 18% women and 82% male. The IDF is the most open and even deliberate in getting women into the military, and they're still only in the 30%ish range.
Can we say what the actual ratio in the Imperium is? Of course not. We can guess. I would say that overall it is probably somewhere between 20 and 30% women in the IG overall, which would line up with the real world quite nicely. That 20-30% would be spread out, some in mono-gender regiments but most of the Imperium's regiments would be mixed I would say. Probably upwards of 90-95% of regiments.
This would definitely still be a majority male IG, but with plenty of women in it as well.
Grey Templar wrote:Your chainsword analogy is dumb. Here is why.
The chainsword works in the setting, chainsaws would be terrible weapons IRL. The contradition is covered by "space technology/magic". Same with gravity. Gravity is the same, but technology has allowed for the cheating of gravity.
Aka, you can ignore logic when you want to. Why one, and not the other? Explain to me how technology has allowed for the cheating of gravity, using IRL logic.
And actually, we have PLENTY to suggest the Imperium's attitudes to sex/gender are different. There is no restriction visible on women as HLOT. The Sororitas are only all women because of a legal loophole brought on by the misuse of gendered language. They're not recruited because "we don't normally have women soldiers!!", they're recruited because the Imperium used the archaic term "men-at-arms". Does that imply the Imperium also doesn't have non-binary soldiers, because they said "men-at-arms"? Patently false, as a majority of Admech characters that GW have written lately are non-binary.
The fact that legal loophole exists within Imperial legal precedent is predicated on there being a difference. If the Imperium was truly a post-gender society in every way then nobody would have noticed the loophole at all. Men-at-arms would have been viewed with the rules as intended reading and not the rules as written. Men-at-arms would be read to clearly mean human soldier, not male soldier specifically. Heck, the continued existence of gendered language at all suggests that it still matters to some people in-universe, even if only on a subconscious level.
No, what it says is that the Imperium is bound up in so many legalese and power-grabbing that very clearly obvious errors and mis-words can be weaponised and used.
The Imperium isn't "post-gender". Post-gender would be more akin to Orks. The Imperium *recognises* gender as existing, but doesn't care too much about what genders are expected to do. What it *does* care about is legitimacy, legalese, and bureaucracy - and so when a piece of writing that uses an archaic definition (which the Imperium is FULL of) gets passed as law, it is taken literally, instead of every sensible person realising "hey, that's REALLY stupid, we clearly didn't mean that".
The existence of gendered language is likely because of the game being written by real people, and their own unconcious biases and gendered language being used in their writing of the lore. Let's not forget when 40k was created, and how a lot of nuances of gendered language weren't as recognised as today.
Hell - us even saying "guardsmen" is gendered language! Yet, we do both recognise that women serve in the guard! This more suggests that the people who created the game are the ones where the buck stops with, not the fictional world they created.
However, biology still would assert itself upon human behavior and choices. This would result in the same effects we see on modern military force compositions in countries where there is gender equality. The US military has no barriers to women joining and is an all volunteer force, its still 18% women and 82% male. The IDF is the most open and even deliberate in getting women into the military, and they're still only in the 30%ish range.
People used the same argument 100 years ago to say that women could never fight. How long until that changes again?
Considering Cadia, when it stood, had everybody born there in the guard, the number one primo example guard force would be just about equal in men and women. According to the real world, 4 billion men and 3.95 billion women were alive in 2022, meaning that if Cadia has similar ratios (which there's no guarantee of, but we'll use these numbers) it'd be about 49.7% women and 50.3% men.
I have wrestled with the term guardsmen before, primarily because guardswomen or guardspeople are just long words and guard sounds too ambiguous... so I tend to use trooper instead these days
We are saying that there are no specific blockages against women in Imperial society. However, biology still would assert itself upon human behavior and choices. This would result in the same effects we see on modern military force compositions in countries where there is gender equality. The US military has no barriers to women joining and is an all volunteer force, its still 18% women and 82% male. The IDF is the most open and even deliberate in getting women into the military, and they're still only in the 30%ish range.
The main problem I see with this argument is that you seem to be assuming that gender cap is the result of biology and not cultural pressures. Or perhaps that you're assuming that 41st millenium cultural pressures are extremely similar to modern-day ones.
That is, in the modern US, it is still pretty common for girls to be discouraged (or at least less encouraged) to engage in traditionally masculine activities. This can include things like "playing soldier," but it can also apply to combat-unrelated hobbies, interests, and expectations that can all factor into making the millitary seem less welcoming to women than it is to men.
A modern US woman's great grandmother may not have had the right to vote. Her grandmother may have been expected to be a housekeeper and have required her husband or father's permission to withdraw money from her own bank account. Her mother might have been the first woman many of her coworkers ever interacted with in their office.
An imperial woman's great grandmother might have been a PDF hero who helped hold off the ork invaders. Her grandmother might have used that reputation to rise to prominence in the local millitary and join the guard. Her mother might have opted for an administratum job, but she still raised her daughter on tales of her ancestor's glories. And when she watches a holovid put out by the imperium to serve as war propaganda, she's probably seeing plenty of woman as well as men in the ranks of those guardsmen.
Both of these women are legally allowed to enroll in the millitary, but you can see why one might be more likely to do so than the other.
So culturally, the imperium is pretty dissimilar from the modern world. I certainly hope we can agree on that. That being the case, you can see why a culture in a setting where aliens are constantly invading and your society has to churn out an absurd number of soldiers is more likely to promote a culture that makes it easier to churn out those soldiers. It seems to me that a culture in the 41st millenium that discourages people from joining the millitary is less likely to come about than one that promotes it.
If you want to double-down on biological factors, I think plenty of people in this thread have made solid cases for why physical strength is unlikely to prevent a woman from joining the guard. So what are the specific biological factors that you think would cause 20%-30% fewer women to join the guard than their male counterparts?
Or, and this is not an attempt to put words in your mouth, do you think that gendered language existing at one point in time in the imperium is sufficient evidence to assume that the cultural norms of the imperium as a whole skew towards discouraging women from participating in military service?
This is a weak, vibes-based argument, but men and women both seem to be pretty evenly represented among commissars, inquisitors, arbites, enforcers, gangers, and naval personnel. Like, I didn't go through and count every named and gendered character to hold those positions, but examples of women in each of those roles come to mind. And no one ever seems to freak out about any of them being women. So it really feels like the guard would have to be kind of an odd duck to be one of the only parts of imperial society to have a large gender gap where no such gap appears to exist elsewhere.
It would be like finding out that 80% of all chefs in the imperial navy are men because sexism is prevalent in the modern culinary world.
Grey Templar wrote:Your chainsword analogy is dumb. Here is why.
The chainsword works in the setting, chainsaws would be terrible weapons IRL. The contradition is covered by "space technology/magic". Same with gravity. Gravity is the same, but technology has allowed for the cheating of gravity.
Aka, you can ignore logic when you want to. Why one, and not the other? Explain to me how technology has allowed for the cheating of gravity, using IRL logic.
I don't know how the Imperium's technology cheats gravity, it is obviously fictional. But it is patently clear that the Imperium has anti-grav technology(hover tanks and bikes and such).
This is different from you asserting that biology's effects on human social spheres has been eradicated.
We are saying that there are no specific blockages against women in Imperial society. However, biology still would assert itself upon human behavior and choices. This would result in the same effects we see on modern military force compositions in countries where there is gender equality. The US military has no barriers to women joining and is an all volunteer force, its still 18% women and 82% male. The IDF is the most open and even deliberate in getting women into the military, and they're still only in the 30%ish range.
The main problem I see with this argument is that you seem to be assuming that gender cap is the result of biology and not cultural pressures. Or perhaps that you're assuming that 41st millenium cultural pressures are extremely similar to modern-day ones.
You seem to be assuming that biology and cultural pressures are unrelated things. They are not.
The reason that most societies throughout history have combat/hunting roles being assigned to men is because of biology effecting how societies form their cultural practices. Women stay home to raise children and do jobs related to being near the home because for the majority of women in these early societies that is what they are doing. Men do hunting and gathering(and eventually warfare) because they are not tied down in the same way.
Human societies all across the world with zero cultural contamination from each other follow this basic cultural template. Uncontacted tribes in the Amazon or deep in Africa or on isolated islands in the pacific generally have these same norms with men hunting or raiding rival tribes while women remain closer to their homes. There is sometimes some overlap but there is a clear preference and divide, and since it can't be because of contact with other societies it must stem from a biological source.
This tells us that human biology is the root cause of society gender roles. Therefore, as long as humans have the current biological forms that we do it is going to cause our societies to develop along these lines. And if and when that happens, the creatures living that way won't truly be human anymore.
Since humans in 40k still look and seem to act identical to modern day humans, there is no reason to belive that anything in this regard has changed.
If you want to double-down on biological factors, I think plenty of people in this thread have made solid cases for why physical strength is unlikely to prevent a woman from joining the guard. So what are the specific biological factors that you think would cause 20%-30% fewer women to join the guard than their male counterparts?
Well, for one human women are still clearly needed for reproduction. So that right there precludes a chunk of human society from being enrolled in the guard. The Imperium will most certainly favor recruiting the unemployed or unoccupied portions of society, women who are staying home and raising children will be low on the priority when there are unemployed/underemployed men. The fact the Imperium has its huge population implies lots of women having children and all the responsibilities that go with it. Even if only half of women have/raise their children, that would still cut down how many women join the guard voluntarily by a massive amount. Plenty to reduce the IG to being roughly 20-30% women.
The only way you could get to 50-50 ratios is if the Imperium was deliberately taking women to meet a quota and allowed for zero exceptions to draft notices. IE: They would send draft notices randomly and not allow for people to get out of the tithe because they have children or have any other sort of condition that prevents them from getting drafted. The Imperium is heartless enough to do that, but that sort of behavior would only cause more trouble than it would be worth. It would just be easier to allow for those exceptions and end up taking mostly men. Sure, single unmarried women with no children will get drafted as readily as single unmarried dudes. But there will be a lot less women in that category than men. Men are ultimately more disposable to human societies, yet another reason why they tend to make up the bulk of soldiers.
This is a weak, vibes-based argument, but men and women both seem to be pretty evenly represented among commissars, inquisitors, arbites, enforcers, gangers, and naval personnel. Like, I didn't go through and count every named and gendered character to hold those positions, but examples of women in each of those roles come to mind. And no one ever seems to freak out about any of them being women. So it really feels like the guard would have to be kind of an odd duck to be one of the only parts of imperial society to have a large gender gap where no such gap appears to exist elsewhere.
Yes, and?
You could still have fairly even representation of named characters in books and still have only 20-30% of all IG be women. Disproportional representation because GW wants more female representation to boost sales/popularity/cultural brownie points.
But again, you don't want to just count named characters. The nameless mooks in the background count too, and I would bet that most of them be dudes in the GW artwork or various novels, even the new stuff. GW is just making an effort to ensure that more of them are women, for diversity and not because it would necessarily make sense in the setting.
But again, nobody is arguing that having female characters in these positions is counter to the setting. Just to remember that they wouldn't make up anywhere near 50% of the population in a military context due to the above factors which all stem from biological effects on human society and culture.
So, Space Magic allows women to fight with two chainswords in battle as seen in the Jackhals. But the Space Magic doesn't allow women into the guard because of biology?
Chaos is really a great place.
Sgt. Cortez wrote: So, Space Magic allows women to fight with two chainswords in battle as seen in the Jackhals. But the Space Magic doesn't allow women into the guard because of biology?
Chaos is really a great place.
Way to not read a single thing that was actually said.
Since you obviously can't be bothered, I'll simplify it for you.
The Imperium does not discriminate based on sex. However, biological norms still effect the behavior of humans within the Imperium. These norms will naturally cause a sex imbalance in the Imperial Guard because women will be less likely to choose to participate in armed conflict, and unlike men will have more opportunities to be exempt from conscription, as they have done in the millennia in the past and will continue to do so going forward into the future.
These factors will naturally depress the sex ratio from a hypothetically purely neutral one of 50-50 to something more like 70-30 or 80-20 without any outside forces getting involved. And since obviously the Imperium isn't going to bother with something as silly as sex quotas nothing will override this natural tendency to skew the population of the armed forces. This would still result in, assuming that all competency and promotions are done with even distribution among the sexes, between 1 in 5 and 1 in 3 officers and other high ranking individuals being women. That feels completely realistic and well within saying that there is gender equality and good representation in the Imperium.
Sgt. Cortez wrote: So, Space Magic allows women to fight with two chainswords in battle as seen in the Jackhals. But the Space Magic doesn't allow women into the guard because of biology?
Chaos is really a great place.
Way to not read a single thing that was actually said.
Since you obviously can't be bothered, I'll simplify it for you.
The Imperium does not discriminate based on sex. However, biological norms still effect the behavior of humans within the Imperium. These norms will naturally cause a sex imbalance in the Imperial Guard because women will be less likely to choose to participate in armed conflict, and unlike men will have more opportunities to be exempt from conscription, as they have done in the millennia in the past and will continue to do so going forward into the future.
These factors will naturally depress the sex ratio from a hypothetically purely neutral one of 50-50 to something more like 70-30 or 80-20 without any outside forces getting involved. And since obviously the Imperium isn't going to bother with something as silly as sex quotas nothing will override this natural tendency to skew the population of the armed forces. This would still result in, assuming that all competency and promotions are done with even distribution among the sexes, between 1 in 5 and 1 in 3 officers and other high ranking individuals being women. That feels completely realistic and well within saying that there is gender equality and good representation in the Imperium.
Oh I read it. What I'm saying is I look at the models the background is based on and it's obvious to me that the "biological norms" don’t exist in 40K. It's a fantasy World through and through where unaugmented men and women wield two chainsaws and run screaming into battle. The same men and women can make up the Guard.
Biological norms are questionable in a place where there are humans that look like Ogres or Hobbits. In 40K 25000 years are enough to evolve a human into an Ogryn. And you're trying to tell me the minor differences between men and women that I consider mostly culturally influenced can't change in the same timeframe to produce a guard with 50% women?
And I don’t even touch the problem of old Cadian or current Catachan models that don’t look anything like a normal human.
You seem to be assuming that biology and cultural pressures are unrelated things. They are not.
The reason that most societies throughout history have combat/hunting roles being assigned to men is because of biology effecting how societies form their cultural practices. Women stay home to raise children and do jobs related to being near the home because for the majority of women in these early societies that is what they are doing. Men do hunting and gathering(and eventually warfare) because they are not tied down in the same way.
That actually seems to be at least partly a misconception. I did some research recently about hunter-gatherer societies for my primal D&D setting, and turns out they were surprisingly gender equal.
Nevelon wrote: Even if you have standards where men are going to out perform women, how high is the bar? If the average man is at 6, and the average woman is at 5, does it mater if the guard only needs you at 3?
Sure, they would prefer an army full of 10s, but they get what they get and use them.
Welcome to the guard, here is your lasgun and flack vest. Go die for the Imperium.
Problem is that average woman is lot lower than 5, and Guard (generally) needs you at lot higher than 6.
Average adult woman will lose in a fight against a 16 year old boy. That is a fact. The moment boys enter puberty, their physical ability vis-a-vis women skyrockets.
When I was in university, I once playwrestled with a female colleague... neither of us was in great physical shape, we were similar in size and build... yet despite that, it was like wrestling a kid. I had to be careful not to hurt her.
And sure, you don't need much physical strength to fight when you have a lasgun. Hell, even knights didn't need to be that physically strong - weapons are a great equalizer.
However, men, physically, simply have significant advantages over women.
Let's take a man and a woman of the same size - same height, weight and overall fitness level.
Man will still have far denser bones, thus significantly improving resistance to injury. And I don't mean just "breaking a bone", but also cumulative injuries under effort. It also means that said bones are better at protecting internal organs from injury - and that matters, because armor can only dissipate force, not cancel it outright (until you get into stuff like forcefields, which is no longer armor).
Man will also have far greater proportion of fast-twitch muscle fibers, meaning far greater ability to exercise force - in a fight or otherwise. Greater muscle strength relative to mass also means that he will be less likely to suffer injury during fairly normal activities - such as marching, setting up camp, digging trenches...
This greater proportion of fast-twitch muscle fibers also means faster reaction time, which means better ability to avoid getting hit in the first place.
Male brain is also better adopted to reading mechanical aspects such as speed, depth and distance (where female brain is better at reading faces and emotions). Thus, men will be better able to target the enemy.
Men are also psychologically more aggressive than women.
In short, a man that is of the same size as a woman will have far more advantages than, say, a man going up against another man much smaller than himself - and at the same time will have none of the disadvantages that come with increased mass.
Of course, as Mad Doc says, there are things to consider such as abhumans... but for baseline humans, which are the majority in the Imperium? No.
So to put it simply: there is no obstacle to there being women in the Imperium Guard. But it also makes no sense for them to be 50% or even overall a significant percentage of the Imperial Guard.
Wyldhunt wrote: Not directly related, but I just recalled that in one of the arbites novels, a psyker tries to psychically attack a high-ranking arbite by making her think she's in an alternate version of her life where she's clumsy and out of shape, and her response is to start doing some exercises.
It's neither the guard nor even "reality." However, the implication is that a scenario where an arbite could be notably clumsy and out of shape (iirc I think the text may have suggested that she was a little pudgy in this scenario) was considered realistic to not be immediately illusion-shattering. I know that some specialized arbites have desk jobs, but I still feel like your average low-ranking arbite (which is what she was in this scenario) would still need to meet certain physical requirements. I'd be kind of surprised if those requirements weren't at least in the same ballpark as the requirements for the guard.
So if we're comfortable assuming arbites have requirements similar to the guard, and if being clumsy and out of shape isn't a disqualifier for being an arbites, then a reasonably in-shape woman probably meets the requirements for being in the guard.
There is no reason to assume that Arbites have the same requirements as the PDF, let alone the guard.
Modern police - excluding Special Forces - have physical test on entrance... and after that it is mostly chair and donut time. Most policemen are in no better shape than your average civilian office worker.
There is no reason to assume that Arbites have the same requirements as the PDF, let alone the guard. Modern police - excluding Special Forces - have physical test on entrance...
lol, ok.
Arbites aren't "modern police".
They come from the same place as Scions, Sororitas, Inquisitors, and Commissars. Precints of 50-60 are expected to be able to act as a precursor force to reclamation by the Imperium if a world turns renegade.
and after that it is mostly chair and donut time. Most policemen are in no better shape than your average civilian office worker.
Try meeting actual police officers rather than just watching TV shows? As much as I feel like police here in the US are woefully underqualified--it isn't from their exercise regimens.
Nevelon wrote: Even if you have standards where men are going to out perform women, how high is the bar? If the average man is at 6, and the average woman is at 5, does it mater if the guard only needs you at 3?
Sure, they would prefer an army full of 10s, but they get what they get and use them.
Welcome to the guard, here is your lasgun and flack vest. Go die for the Imperium.
Problem is that average woman is lot lower than 5, and Guard (generally) needs you at lot higher than 6.
Average adult woman will lose in a fight against a 16 year old boy. That is a fact. The moment boys enter puberty, their physical ability vis-a-vis women skyrockets.
When I was in university, I once playwrestled with a female colleague... neither of us was in great physical shape, we were similar in size and build... yet despite that, it was like wrestling a kid. I had to be careful not to hurt her.
And sure, you don't need much physical strength to fight when you have a lasgun. Hell, even knights didn't need to be that physically strong - weapons are a great equalizer.
However, men, physically, simply have significant advantages over women.
Let's take a man and a woman of the same size - same height, weight and overall fitness level.
Man will still have far denser bones, thus significantly improving resistance to injury. And I don't mean just "breaking a bone", but also cumulative injuries under effort. It also means that said bones are better at protecting internal organs from injury - and that matters, because armor can only dissipate force, not cancel it outright (until you get into stuff like forcefields, which is no longer armor).
Man will also have far greater proportion of fast-twitch muscle fibers, meaning far greater ability to exercise force - in a fight or otherwise. Greater muscle strength relative to mass also means that he will be less likely to suffer injury during fairly normal activities - such as marching, setting up camp, digging trenches...
This greater proportion of fast-twitch muscle fibers also means faster reaction time, which means better ability to avoid getting hit in the first place.
Male brain is also better adopted to reading mechanical aspects such as speed, depth and distance (where female brain is better at reading faces and emotions). Thus, men will be better able to target the enemy.
Men are also psychologically more aggressive than women.
In short, a man that is of the same size as a woman will have far more advantages than, say, a man going up against another man much smaller than himself - and at the same time will have none of the disadvantages that come with increased mass.
Of course, as Mad Doc says, there are things to consider such as abhumans... but for baseline humans, which are the majority in the Imperium? No.
So to put it simply: there is no obstacle to there being women in the Imperium Guard. But it also makes no sense for them to be 50% or even overall a significant percentage of the Imperial Guard.
Wyldhunt wrote: Not directly related, but I just recalled that in one of the arbites novels, a psyker tries to psychically attack a high-ranking arbite by making her think she's in an alternate version of her life where she's clumsy and out of shape, and her response is to start doing some exercises.
It's neither the guard nor even "reality." However, the implication is that a scenario where an arbite could be notably clumsy and out of shape (iirc I think the text may have suggested that she was a little pudgy in this scenario) was considered realistic to not be immediately illusion-shattering. I know that some specialized arbites have desk jobs, but I still feel like your average low-ranking arbite (which is what she was in this scenario) would still need to meet certain physical requirements. I'd be kind of surprised if those requirements weren't at least in the same ballpark as the requirements for the guard.
So if we're comfortable assuming arbites have requirements similar to the guard, and if being clumsy and out of shape isn't a disqualifier for being an arbites, then a reasonably in-shape woman probably meets the requirements for being in the guard.
There is no reason to assume that Arbites have the same requirements as the PDF, let alone the guard.
Modern police - excluding Special Forces - have physical test on entrance... and after that it is mostly chair and donut time. Most policemen are in no better shape than your average civilian office worker.
This is painful to read. So much misogynistic pseudoscience it’s crazy. Please re-read all of sgt smudges posts and they eloquently and concisely layout why your arguments are so weak.
I'm not even sure what are the positions to be honest.
I mean we know for a fact female guardsmen are a thing and all female IG Regiment are a thing.
Are female guardsmen less common than male ones? Probably, but less common when dealing with the IoM likely still means trillions upon trillions of female guardsmen.
And when it comes to famous IG worlds in which their whole thing is producing guardsmen regiments then I expect a pretty even 50/50 split.
As products of the Schola Progenia? Adeptus Arbites are well trained, well exercised and well fed.
Planetary Police Forces however are not Adeptus Arbites. Sure, in-universe visitors to Planets may use Arbites as a catch all term, but a Chicken doesn’t become a Turkey just because you call it one,
Those Planetary Police Forces will wildly vary. Some are just Bobbies On The Beat. And may in fact be Fat Sweaty Coppers. Others, such as the Palanite Enforcers of Necromunda are much closer to a Paramilitary force, again decently trained, fed and equipped, the result of carefully selected candidates - including already experience Gangers.
In short? There is no set standard, planet to planet.
Hi, going to ask this once, as this thread is generating a lot of reports from BOTH sides of the argument here.. be polite, stay on topic or if it keeps generating reports, we'll lock it.
How much do the physical difference matter in 40k?
It’s a universe where suspensors are not exactly uncommon. So lugging heavy gear around can be mitigated.
The guard tends to deploy en mass. So if there is entrenching to do, how much is done by troopers, or how much help can they get from things like servitors or other attached dedicated help?
The Guard goes to war on an industrial scale.
Another thing to consider is expected foes. Remember the guard are well fed, trained, and equipped compared to most human troops they are expected to fight (rebels, cultists, traitor PDFs) This will help even out any raw disparity in abilities. It’s easy to forget in the over the top world of 40k, where every unit is more elite then the last, that the humble guardsmen is actually not a slouch. They just live in a universe full of things way more nasty.
The most common xenos opponent is going to be an ork, who is going to tear through guardsmen and guardswomen in CC regardless of gender. Same could be said for most other alien races out there. What humanity brings to the table is logistics and numbers. We can’t take anything out there in a fist fight, but there are a lot of us, with reliable guns, standing shoulder to shoulder.
For that we need to maximize our recruitment pool. This is not a volunteer army where we choose the best of the best. It’s conscripted masses, where every warm body is needed on the line.
In older lore (not sure if it’s still valid) children of the regiment would be trained up to join it as whiteshields. And after a successful campaign, the guard would settle on the planet and become the new nobility/ruling class/garrison. For that, you would want a mixed regiment, as you are basically colonizing a planet and would want some gals from home instead of just the guys. And they can fight and win their new world well enough beside the menfolk.
Nevelon wrote: How much do the physical difference matter in 40k?
It’s a universe where suspensors are not exactly uncommon. So lugging heavy gear around can be mitigated.
The guard tends to deploy en mass. So if there is entrenching to do, how much is done by troopers, or how much help can they get from things like servitors or other attached dedicated help?
The Guard goes to war on an industrial scale.
Another thing to consider is expected foes. Remember the guard are well fed, trained, and equipped compared to most human troops they are expected to fight (rebels, cultists, traitor PDFs) This will help even out any raw disparity in abilities. It’s easy to forget in the over the top world of 40k, where every unit is more elite then the last, that the humble guardsmen is actually not a slouch. They just live in a universe full of things way more nasty.
The most common xenos opponent is going to be an ork, who is going to tear through guardsmen and guardswomen in CC regardless of gender. Same could be said for most other alien races out there. What humanity brings to the table is logistics and numbers. We can’t take anything out there in a fist fight, but there are a lot of us, with reliable guns, standing shoulder to shoulder.
For that we need to maximize our recruitment pool. This is not a volunteer army where we choose the best of the best. It’s conscripted masses, where every warm body is needed on the line.
In older lore (not sure if it’s still valid) children of the regiment would be trained up to join it as whiteshields. And after a successful campaign, the guard would settle on the planet and become the new nobility/ruling class/garrison. For that, you would want a mixed regiment, as you are basically colonizing a planet and would want some gals from home instead of just the guys. And they can fight and win their new world well enough beside the menfolk.
This is a good point, the whole boys are stronger/faster etc than girls argument becomes completely irrelevant in the 41st millennium. Even other human foes are juiced up on chaos devotion, most stuff you’ll fight is the stuff of nightmares. Even the strongest fittest humans is outmatched.
The thing with this discussion where it becomes toxic is the fact that people are happy to use real world justifications, which are clouded by real world prejudice but will ignore the in setting reality that flies against their argument altogether.
In universe mass conscription of both male and female population makes complete sense due to the total war of the setting. To ignore that only adds to the toxic feel of the community. The fact that the creators and owners of the setting are actively trying to increase inclusion in the background and models should be a clear signal the direction we are going. Female guard aren’t new, they are only recently getting models but have been around for ages in the fluff.
We should be encouraging as many people as possible to get involved with the hobby, gate keeping and and trying to discourage inclusion is not acceptable. I know the mods have received complaints from both “sides” but I feel it is a duty of anyone to call out and challenge gate keeping and the kind of misogyny we’ve seen in this thread. If we don’t then the community will never improve.
I showed this thread to my 12 year old daughter and she was appalled at the arguments in here. We really need to do better.
Yeah. Respectfully, it kind of feels like the "women would be way less common" camp are using iffy real-world arguments rooted in biased cultures to go out of their way to justify a large gender gap. Like, we really can't confirm any hard percentages here, and I wouldn't be surprised if there was a gender gap. But I also wouldn't be surprised if male/female split was basically 50/50. The arguments being used to insist that the unknown gender gap (if any) is large feel like they're stretching and come across as kind of cringe.
"Woman don't join the guard as often because they're too busy making babies. And then obviously they're the ones who raise the kids."
In the grim dark future of the 41st millenium, it feels really odd to assume that women are so busy making babies, so unable to do something to address that pregnancy, and so commonly assumed to be responsible for child-rearing that it results in a galaxy-wide gender gap in the guard.
You could still have fairly even representation of named characters in books and still have only 20-30% of all IG be women. Disproportional representation because GW wants more female representation to boost sales/popularity/cultural brownie points.
But again, you don't want to just count named characters. The nameless mooks in the background count too, and I would bet that most of them be dudes in the GW artwork or various novels, even the new stuff. GW is just making an effort to ensure that more of them are women, for diversity and not because it would necessarily make sense in the setting.
Not trying to call you out or anything, but you're literally saying that we should assume the representation shown in novels can't be representative of the wider setting. Like, you're using your assumption that you're right about the gender gap as a reason to ignore evidence that contradicts your belief that there's a large gender gap. Isn't that an overt example of begging the question?
This comes across as you wanting there to be a gender gap, so you're rejecting evidence that there isn't one on the basis that it doesn't support your argument. To oversimplify and paraphrase your argument:
"Based on the closest thing we have to first-hand sources from the setting, it seems like women and men are roughly equally represented in most millitary structures in the imperium."
"Those sources are automatically invalid because a small gender gap would be more appealing to real-world audiences."
Like, people have pointed out that real-world cultural factors wouldn't necessarily apply because cultures in the 41st millenium are so vastly different from the real-world. People have pointed out that biological factors would likely be moot or of limited relevance. (Can't outpunch an ork regardless of sex. Can meet physical fitness standards regardless of sex. The guard probably isn't concerned enough about your long-term health to care whether or not you're prone to stress injuries.) At this point, it feels like the only reason to assume that cultural or biological factors "must be" significant enough to result in a large gender gap is that you already want that to be true going into the discussion. Or rather, that you thought about it a bit, decided it was probably true, and are perhaps digging your heels in a bit to avoid changing your minds?
Grey Templar wrote:Your chainsword analogy is dumb. Here is why.
The chainsword works in the setting, chainsaws would be terrible weapons IRL. The contradition is covered by "space technology/magic". Same with gravity. Gravity is the same, but technology has allowed for the cheating of gravity.
Aka, you can ignore logic when you want to. Why one, and not the other? Explain to me how technology has allowed for the cheating of gravity, using IRL logic.
I don't know how the Imperium's technology cheats gravity, it is obviously fictional. But it is patently clear that the Imperium has anti-grav technology(hover tanks and bikes and such).
So, you're suggesting that Titans use anti-grav tech? Where? I don't see it.
That sounds like you're taking something we know to exist, and retroactively applying pseudoscience to handwave its discrepancy from our own world. Interesting. How is that any different from taking the all-women regiments and mass employment of women within the Imperial Guard as something we know to exist, and retroactively applying a logic to it that could handwave its discrepancy from our own world?
Sounds like you're making a very arbitrary distinction there, and exactly what I mean by you handwaving the breaking of IRL physics and logic in 40k for some things, but not others.
This tells us that human biology is the root cause of society gender roles. Therefore, as long as humans have the current biological forms that we do it is going to cause our societies to develop along these lines. And if and when that happens, the creatures living that way won't truly be human anymore.
Since humans in 40k still look and seem to act identical to modern day humans, there is no reason to belive that anything in this regard has changed.
You know, I could be wrong, but people have historically used those sorts of "human biology says that our cultures MUST do this" argument to defend some VERY sketchy stuff, like slavery.
I don't think that you really believe in that, do you? That a sketchy understanding of biology (and a willingness to overlook the cases where this hasn't been the case) must dictate our cultures in a way that reinforces the current dominant cultures of our time? Because that would be very much unscientific and would go against practically everything many sociologists and cultural scholars are currently arguing.
AldarionTelcontar wrote:
Nevelon wrote: Even if you have standards where men are going to out perform women, how high is the bar? If the average man is at 6, and the average woman is at 5, does it mater if the guard only needs you at 3?
Sure, they would prefer an army full of 10s, but they get what they get and use them.
Welcome to the guard, here is your lasgun and flack vest. Go die for the Imperium.
Problem is that average woman is lot lower than 5, and Guard (generally) needs you at lot higher than 6.
Do you have sources for ANY of this, or are you just making up numbers?
And sure, you don't need much physical strength to fight when you have a lasgun.
Congratulations, you realised why all this posturing about male bodies being strong is completely unnecessary.
Man will still have far denser bones, thus significantly improving resistance to injury. And I don't mean just "breaking a bone", but also cumulative injuries under effort. It also means that said bones are better at protecting internal organs from injury - and that matters, because armor can only dissipate force, not cancel it outright (until you get into stuff like forcefields, which is no longer armor).
I'm sure all those bones will protect you from flesh-burrowing parasites, supercharged lasers, rocket propelled grenades, and weapons that atomise you. /s
The differences are frankly MINISCULE and wouldn't even be considered by recruitment. And we know this, because 1. We see women in the guard. 2. We see conscripts in the guard, literally used as cannon fodder. 3. There's plenty of regiments which recruit from pretty slight populations - Salvar-Chem Dogs and Tanith, etc.
Wyldhunt wrote:Yeah. Respectfully, it kind of feels like the "women would be way less common" camp are using iffy real-world arguments rooted in biased cultures to go out of their way to justify a large gender gap. Like, we really can't confirm any hard percentages here, and I wouldn't be surprised if there was a gender gap. But I also wouldn't be surprised if male/female split was basically 50/50. The arguments being used to insist that the unknown gender gap (if any) is large feel like they're stretching and come across as kind of cringe.
Absolutely true. The facts of the setting simply *do not match* the super biased and frankly misleading arguments being raised about the real world, as well as not really reflecting the malleability of culture and the bodies within it. The whole thing reads as incredibly myopic.
You're literally saying that we should assume the representation shown in novels can't be representative of the wider setting. Like, you're using your assumption that you're right about the gender gap as a reason to ignore evidence that contradicts your belief that there's a large gender gap. Isn't that an overt example of begging the question?
This comes across as you wanting there to be a gender gap, so you're rejecting evidence that there isn't one on the basis that it doesn't support your argument. To oversimplify and paraphrase your argument:
"Based on the closest thing we have to first-hand sources from the setting, it seems like women and men are roughly equally represented in most millitary structures in the imperium."
"Those sources are automatically invalid because a small gender gap would be more appealing to real-world audiences."
Exactly. I feel like none of the arguments being made on that front are really addressing how we see plenty of women in the Guard, and that this point here about "well, that's just GW pandering and over-representing their world" is a great example of admitting that you don't really care about what GW have said and shown, you just want to believe in your own real-world logic.
At this point, it feels like the only reason to assume that cultural or biological factors "must be" significant enough to result in a large gender gap is that you already want that to be true going into the discussion. Or rather, that you thought about it a bit, decided it was probably true, and are perhaps digging your heels in a bit to avoid changing your minds?
This also feels very true. And I'd like if people could open their minds up to the idea just a bit more.
Sgt_Smudge wrote: Exactly. I feel like none of the arguments being made on that front are really addressing how we see plenty of women in the Guard, and that this point here about "well, that's just GW pandering and over-representing their world" is a great example of admitting that you don't really care about what GW have said and shown, you just want to believe in your own real-world logic.
Conversely, there hasn't been anything presented to support any particular ratio of men/women in the Guard.
For example the vast majority of the model range is male, the vast majority of the artwork depicts males, the great majority of fiction features guardsmen rather than guardswomen. In the absence of GW having said anything specific, what they've shown could reasonably be taken to suggest a majority male make-up.
It's all very well to accuse people of wanting to believe their real world logic; but that's completely hollow when no more concrete evidence has been presented to support gender equal recruiting. It looks a lot like picking a side based not on any evidence, but on feels.
Before somebody accuses me of hating women or something, I don't particularly care either way (beyond thinking that separate male and female regiments being more common than mixed regiments makes far more sense to me, as they would be easier to resupply), but I'm not going to pick a side without any actual evidence.
Sgt_Smudge wrote: Exactly. I feel like none of the arguments being made on that front are really addressing how we see plenty of women in the Guard, and that this point here about "well, that's just GW pandering and over-representing their world" is a great example of admitting that you don't really care about what GW have said and shown, you just want to believe in your own real-world logic.
Conversely, there hasn't been anything presented to support any particular ratio of men/women in the Guard.
For example the vast majority of the model range is male, the vast majority of the artwork depicts males, the great majority of fiction features guardsmen rather than guardswomen. In the absence of GW having said anything specific, what they've shown could reasonably be taken to suggest a majority male make-up.
It's all very well to accuse people of wanting to believe their real world logic; but that's completely hollow when no more concrete evidence has been presented to support gender equal recruiting. It looks a lot like picking a side based not on any evidence, but on feels.
Before somebody accuses me of hating women or something, I don't particularly care either way (beyond thinking that separate male and female regiments being more common than mixed regiments makes far more sense to me, as they would be easier to resupply), but I'm not going to pick a side without any actual evidence.
You're not wrong. But I'd say one side is saying: female guard should be in the low digits, maximum 30% because *women in our world are really weak and could never be any different or it would break the laws of biology or at least my immersion*
While the other side argues: from what we know about the setting 50% women are possible.
Sgt_Smudge wrote: Exactly. I feel like none of the arguments being made on that front are really addressing how we see plenty of women in the Guard, and that this point here about "well, that's just GW pandering and over-representing their world" is a great example of admitting that you don't really care about what GW have said and shown, you just want to believe in your own real-world logic.
Conversely, there hasn't been anything presented to support any particular ratio of men/women in the Guard.
For example the vast majority of the model range is male, the vast majority of the artwork depicts males, the great majority of fiction features guardsmen rather than guardswomen. In the absence of GW having said anything specific, what they've shown could reasonably be taken to suggest a majority male make-up.
It's all very well to accuse people of wanting to believe their real world logic; but that's completely hollow when no more concrete evidence has been presented to support gender equal recruiting. It looks a lot like picking a side based not on any evidence, but on feels.
Before somebody accuses me of hating women or something, I don't particularly care either way (beyond thinking that separate male and female regiments being more common than mixed regiments makes far more sense to me, as they would be easier to resupply), but I'm not going to pick a side without any actual evidence.
You're not wrong. But I'd say one side is saying: female guard should be in the low digits, maximum 30% because *women in our world are really weak and could never be any different or it would break the laws of biology or at least my immersion*
While the other side argues: from what we know about the setting 50% women are possible.
Yeah, pretty much this. I can't give you a confident, specific number for what percentage of the guard are women. However, I also don't think we have enough evidence to confidently say that the percentage is especially low (<= 30% as someone suggested.) So it's less that I'm arguing for near 50% representation and more that I'm arguing against "but women have to make and raise babies" and "but women are so bad at arm wrestling though" as compelling evidence for someone to assert especially low representation.
* The fact that the imperium wants to be able to churn out a lot of soldiers suggests that they should be systemically predisposed towards accepting as many recruits as they can get. If sex isn't an absolute deal breaker, they're not going to go around discouraging half their recruiting pool from joining.
* As previously mentioned, I haven't counted up named characters from novels, but it seems like we see a pretty even split between men and women in at least most imperial military branches if not the guard itself. Especially in higher ranks or relatively "elite" roles (because those are the characters stories tend to focus on.) So unless someone wants to make the case that the imperium of man is actively trying to push women into high-ranking positions rather than promoting those characters to their ranks due to their abilities...
* Orks don't particularly care how much a puny human can benchpress. So any sexually dimorphic differences in average strength seem irrelevant. And has been pointed out, there are whole worlds known for having relatively scrawny populations that can apparently meet the minimum guard requirements just fine.
Those bullet points aren't enough for me to confidently say that women constitute 45% of the imperial guard, or whatever, but they do make me dubious there would be something like a 2:1 male:female ratio.
We also have first hand source in the form of Commissar Cain that all lady regiments are nothing remarkable. Whilst he’s not exactly a galactic authority, that’s still an informative view.
Inquisitor Vail likewise finds absolutely nothing noteworthy in women serving in the Guard. Again, whilst she’s not going to have absolute knowledge, as an Inquisitor she’ll naturally have a greater experience than Cain, so that’s a second informative first hand opinion.
Though it is worth noting they both consider Lady General Jena Sulit to the first Lady General, other sources show that to be incorrect.
Also also? Cain’s parents were apparently killed by Kroot whilst on active duty in the Guard, hence he was raised in the Schola Progenium, as that’s where the orphans of Imperial Officers tend to be sent.
That in itself is an informative status quo. After all, you’re not an orphan if only your Dad is dead, anymore than I’m an orphan because my Mum passed away.
So for that many orphans? Enough to support multiple branches of the military? Men and Women serving must be pretty common place, no?
Also when it comes to the model range its insanely limited compared to the reality of the setting. Just consider that most of the Guard we have is Cadian; with one or two specialist units represented by one box of models.
Whilst in the setting there are thousands of different regiments; each with their own uniforms, equipment, styles of battle. Even generic things like the Leman Russ would differ between different Forgeworlds and regiments (still keeping within set designs established millennia ago of course).
The model range is bonkers tiny compared to the reality of the setting. So sure the male-female ratio is very stark in the model range; but the model range also only really depicts 1 force from 1 world. That doesn't suddenly invalidate all the other in-lore regiments from existing. It just means its the domain of custom work or imagination because GW can't make thousands of different regiments
Minor side note: Gaunts Ghosts are also a mixed regiment, at least after the inclusion of the Vergastines. And if my memory doesn't betray me there where never any mentions that the ladies had problems performing on the level necessary for duty. A significant proportion of them where hard of hearing or deaf and could still serve...
@ General topic: while my first few posts argued in the direction that sending of just the men makes sense under the assumption that tithes happen so often and to such a high degree that they make a non-neglectible dent in the population in reproductive age on a planet I have to say the arguments brought up by numerous posters here have convinced me otherwise. The sheer scale of the imperial population paired with the option of sending a couple of million (or even billion) new settlers from one of the overcrowded hive worlds should any one planet really get in trouble with its population numbers should make this a moot point in all but the most extremely isolated scenarios.
And I agree that given the tech available to the Guard (lasguns, tanks etc.) and the expected enemies that smash the humble guards(wo)man anyway if they close the distance, conscripting just or preferably men does not seem that logical, to me at least.
ah yes, let nonsense be the enemy of reason for the boon of ideals not bound by reality of the Story.
What you are once again repeatedly conveniently forgetting is a setting with a natural material universe, in a galaxy with a mode of transportation that has questionable performance between isolated places in a vast emptyness making every single planet rather isolated.
There absolutely are stable Warp Routes. Worlds which are at a nexus of multiple Warp Routes usually become Bastion Worlds as way to secure those for The Imperium, and to act as a central hub for military operations across the planets and systems of those stable routes.
Now, some worlds will be routes wise on the arse end of nowhere. And because of how the warp doesn’t give a fig about realspace distances, that doesn’t require the isolated world to be far flung. It could be the next habitable star system over, but if the Warp Currents are on the wonk around it, you’re still going to be isolated, because non-warp based interstellar travel just isn’t gonna happen.
But even then, thanks to the tech available to the Imperium as a whole, provided a system has one Earth-like world (or made one that way during the Golden Age), the moons and planets of that system are very likely to have some kind of populace scurrying about. This includes planetoids and asteroid mining, orbital dockyards etc.
A cursory Google shows right now, Earth has an estimated 2.3 billion humans aged 20-39. Or around 29.9% of our total population. With another 2.6 billion aged 0-19, or 32.2%.
Because a billion is a frankly staggering number? You can still ship 1,000,000 off world each year, every year, and not dent the population at all. Because those that are left are still gonna human, and makes more humans. It’s something our species is really, really good at.
And remember your tithe is linked to your overall population, resources, specialisation and tech base. It’s not a one size fits all approach.
An Agri-world for instance may have no manpower tithe to the Guard whatsoever, because being of typically (and comparatively) low population density and heavily automated, you need to keep that population where it is. The tithe there will be foodstuffs, and perhaps some PDF, possibly a small number of bodies to the Guard.
A Hive World will have a dramatically higher tithe. Its population will run well into the billions. And its manufactorums can churn out prodigious quantities of basic firearms and fighting vehicles. Even so, across the world you could probably recruit 10,000,000 Guardsmen a month and nobody is going to notice. At all. And they’ll still be popping out sprogs at a similarly prodigious rate. Indeed, meeting such a tithe may be part of the overall balancing act of managing such a planet.
Most Hive Worlds have a population massively in excess of what it can support alone. So shipping several million warm bodies off to the Guard each year helps manage that somewhat.
And hey. A life in the Guard, from a civvies point of view means regular rations, regular water, and an alternative to the drudgery of a life working in the manufactorums.
Wyldhunt wrote: * Orks don't particularly care how much a puny human can benchpress. So any sexually dimorphic differences in average strength seem irrelevant.
I think that's overly reductive- there's a lot more that muscle and size matter for than how hard can you punch. It's not like modern-day soldiers bench press so they can best fight in hand to hand combat, but there's still a push towards physical strength to handle all the other demands of soldiering. Gear is heavy. Guns are heavy. The bigger you are, the easier it is to handle recoil, and to manipulate a 10+lb weapon system (let alone haul a 30lb machine gun and employ it effectively). Digging ditches and stacking sandbags are physically intensive tasks. Operating a tank is more demanding than people think. The Guard is not a 'hit the big red button while drinking coffee' military force.
But sexual dimorphism is two overlapping bell curves, not mutual exclusion. It's not an excuse or justification for an all-male army. It just means we might expect to see more female pilots and more male cannon loaders.
And really, I think the politics of the world supplying a regiment probably matter more. A planet that drafts by lottery is not going to have any gender bias. A planet that uses physical trials for recruitment will send off regiments of musclemen. A planet that selects for more representative soldiering ability will be mixed-sex. A planet that is struggling to meet its tithe will send whoever it can get. A planet with a patriarchal or matriarchal tradition of governance will probably be overtly sexist in its recruitment one way or the other, to the detriment of its troop quality. A planet in a state of total war may favor sending its men off to fight- loss of genetic diversity in the next generation being preferable to demographic collapse.
The Imperium is a vast, dysfunctional bureaucracy of a million fiefdoms with their own priorities and values that dictate Guard recruitment. Also, it's a fictional entity with no hard numbers given about its demographic makeup- I don't really see a point in speculating about specifics; we know that all-male, all-female, and mixed-sex regiments exist. You don't need census tables to justify Your Dudes.
Certainly the Lasgun is assembled from metal and plastic. Its ammo is going to be markedly lighter than bullets, being essentially a battery pack. Also, no recoil on your Lasgun, Pistol or Cannon.
Heavy Weapon Teams are splitting the labour. Dedicated Gunner and Loader for shooty bit. But moving it and setting it up? The burden is shared.
And we don’t tend to see the models carrying large backpacks or anything on the regular.
For reference, the C7A2 used by the Canadian Forces is 4.58KG with a scope and a full mag. The scope adds about 700G to the weight, so both weapons should weight relatively the same when the Lasgun gets its own external attachment.
Furthermore, there's a saying that nowadays soldiers carry more lighter gear than before, in that while gear is lighter (and less bulky) than it was, it just means they carry more of it and thus don't really carry less weight.
As for Heavy Weapons, well, there's a shared burden, but it's still quite the burden, even for something as ''light'' as the GPMG you're looking at one guy carrying the actual gun (11,6KG plus however many bullets in a sling you wanna keep on the gun), and some ammo, and the other carries the greater portion of the ammo as well as at least a spare barrel. Add a tripod that's about the weight of the gun if you're going to entrench somewhere, and a C7 for the assistant gunner, it adds quite a lot.
Wyldhunt wrote: * Orks don't particularly care how much a puny human can benchpress. So any sexually dimorphic differences in average strength seem irrelevant.
I think that's overly reductive- there's a lot more that muscle and size matter for than how hard can you punch. It's not like modern-day soldiers bench press so they can best fight in hand to hand combat, but there's still a push towards physical strength to handle all the other demands of soldiering. Gear is heavy. Guns are heavy. The bigger you are, the easier it is to handle recoil, and to manipulate a 10+lb weapon system (let alone haul a 30lb machine gun and employ it effectively). Digging ditches and stacking sandbags are physically intensive tasks. Operating a tank is more demanding than people think. The Guard is not a 'hit the big red button while drinking coffee' military force.
I was definitely being intentionally reductive there. I still stand by my point though. Whatever the physical demands of the guard may be, I'd be surprised to find that those demands are actively preventing a significant number of women from joining up. Maybe women get prioritized for tank duty. Maybe women just dig trenches and carry around lasguns well enough for it not to matter.
The Imperium is a vast, dysfunctional bureaucracy of a million fiefdoms with their own priorities and values that dictate Guard recruitment. Also, it's a fictional entity with no hard numbers given about its demographic makeup- I don't really see a point in speculating about specifics; we know that all-male, all-female, and mixed-sex regiments exist. You don't need census tables to justify Your Dudes.
See, I'm fine with saying we simply don't know hard numbers. I'm fine with saying that some worlds will have a gender bias for their guard tithes. I guess I'm just less okay with people trying to make firm assertions about the topic using the physical and cultural norms of real-world modern day Earth as evidence.
It kind of comes across like, "We can't possibly know specifics about the sex statistics of the imperial guard. But what we can say for sure is that there aren't a lot of women because those noodle-armed baby factories are too busy raising the kids."
Sgt_Smudge wrote: Exactly. I feel like none of the arguments being made on that front are really addressing how we see plenty of women in the Guard, and that this point here about "well, that's just GW pandering and over-representing their world" is a great example of admitting that you don't really care about what GW have said and shown, you just want to believe in your own real-world logic.
Conversely, there hasn't been anything presented to support any particular ratio of men/women in the Guard.
For example the vast majority of the model range is male, the vast majority of the artwork depicts males, the great majority of fiction features guardsmen rather than guardswomen. In the absence of GW having said anything specific, what they've shown could reasonably be taken to suggest a majority male make-up.
It's all very well to accuse people of wanting to believe their real world logic; but that's completely hollow when no more concrete evidence has been presented to support gender equal recruiting. It looks a lot like picking a side based not on any evidence, but on feels.
Before somebody accuses me of hating women or something, I don't particularly care either way (beyond thinking that separate male and female regiments being more common than mixed regiments makes far more sense to me, as they would be easier to resupply), but I'm not going to pick a side without any actual evidence.
You're not wrong. But I'd say one side is saying: female guard should be in the low digits, maximum 30% because *women in our world are really weak and could never be any different or it would break the laws of biology or at least my immersion*
While the other side argues: from what we know about the setting 50% women are possible.
That isn't the argument at all and is a dishonest simplification of it.
The argument is that the biological situation with women means that women are less likely to end up in the IG then men. Both because of women choosing not to enter the IG due to family obligations(IRL a man with a family is more likely to volunteer than a women with a family. There is zero reason to think the reasons for that are different in 40k) and also taking advantage of exceptions when people are getting drafted.
Admittedly, there is no direct evidence that the Imperium has exceptions when they start drafting people. However, logic dictates that there must always be exceptions to conscription orders at least as a general rule because otherwise they would be utterly impossible and ineffective for the Imperium. Even when you are desperate enough to draft people by force, it doesn't mean you're going to take literally anybody and everybody. That would result in far too many people you don't want in the military. Sick, majorly disabled, skilled laborers, people working vital jobs, people who are the sole providers for their families(who by taking means that you've just generated at best a bunch of people the state now needs to provide for and at worst a bunch of new criminals), etc... You'd only have a no exceptions draft if your planet is being actively overrun by heretics or xenos or whatever at which point all bets are off.
For these reasons, it is entirely logical that the Imperium would still allow for exceptions to draft notices(requiring proof of course). These exceptions would logically include having children/being pregnant, etc... This would generate a few exceptions that men couldn't benefit from/would be less able to benefit from. IE: if a family has both parents get drafted, one of them can get out of it. The women is more likely to be the one to get out of it, be it because the man volunteers to be the one who goes or if its simply policy that if a women gets drafted she is ineligible if there are kids.
Yes, this assumes that most of the Imperium still has a culture where it is primarily women who take care of the children. Unless we have direct evidence that says its not the case however this should be our default since that is what the past and present tells us happens.
Finally, when we only consider people voluntarily joining the IG, again based on the real world, women are just less likely to volunteer. Why this is the case is not entirely clear and we could go on forever trying to find out, but it is a clear trend in the real world among all volunteer militaries. Women just so rarely volunteer for the army compared to men. They just don't want or feel compelled to join. And again, we have no reason to believe that this has changed in 40k. You could come up with specific worlds where this isn't the case, but they'd be an exception.
This could easily result in an IG with women being only 20-30% of its total population. Now, some people might think that "only 30%" is small. Its really not. That is still a huge % compared to modern day where only a couple countries approach that. And honestly it is probably the 'best' you can possibly get given how this seems to work IRL. There are inherent effects that biology has on women and their decision making regarding them joining the military which for whatever reason lowers their likelihood of joining the army.
None of this prevents the women who do choose to join the armed forces from performing well or anything like that. It just means there aren't as many women in the armed forces, and by logical extrapolation the IG. This isn't a good or a bad thing. Its just a thing. Nobody should get offended by this.
It kind of comes across like, "We can't possibly know specifics about the sex statistics of the imperial guard. But what we can say for sure is that there aren't a lot of women because those noodle-armed baby factories are too busy raising the kids."
Only if you are being dishonest. The argument is that the women who are doing X won't be doing Y. Which will naturally depress the ratio of people who are doing Y.
And given the Imperium's ample population, women are obviously still making a lot of children in the 41st millenium and I don't see any attempts by the Imperium to control this. If anything, the Imperium simply chooses to leverage its effectively unlimited population.
It kind of comes across like, "We can't possibly know specifics about the sex statistics of the imperial guard. But what we can say for sure is that there aren't a lot of women because those noodle-armed baby factories are too busy raising the kids."
I'm sure your argument could be as easily dismissed by claiming that it comes across like, 'We can't possibly know specifics about the sex statistics of the Imperial Guard. But what we can say for sure is that there are a lot of women because nobody cares if those weaklings get killed by superior enemies, and maybe equipment is lighter in the future or something so it doesn't matter that the men are stronger'.
Grey Templar wrote: [...]
Finally, when we only consider people voluntarily joining the IG, again based on the real world, women are just less likely to volunteer. [...]
One interesting question here is, as someone mentioned earlier: life in the imperium oftentimes REAALLLLY sucks. And while there are several regions on todays earth where volunteering is rare, there are others were it is more common, especially when being in the military means you at least get some food and water. Then one has to consider that some of those regions, where serving in the military is a possible escape from poverty, don't allow or at least heavily restrict women serving in the military. Even before any performance tests are made.
My point basically is: if we would live in a grimdark dystopia and the option to join the guard is there for both sexes, it might be a lot more desirable for women then we see on todays earth. Tona Creed in the Gaunts Ghosts Novels come to mind, as do the Vergastine militia women. They were in a battle zone against an enemy that did not care that they are women. So one might as well have a gun than just lay down and die.
Regarding standards and conscription: as someone who was amongst the last cohorts being conscripted around here: the entry bar for that was really low in Germany at least. Sure there was some stuff that got you disqualified, mostly old injuries or preconditions that might turn worse when serving, forcing the state to pay for the former conscript which is not really an issue in WH40k. But on the whole I saw several young men being conscripted that... well lets just say that the system wasn't particularly picky. You could be short, fat, have bad eysight, bad hearing, allergic... Would they have had a general draft of both sexes back then, they would definitly have taken at least some women.
It kind of comes across like, "We can't possibly know specifics about the sex statistics of the imperial guard. But what we can say for sure is that there aren't a lot of women because those noodle-armed baby factories are too busy raising the kids."
I'm sure your argument could be as easily dismissed by claiming that it comes across like, 'We can't possibly know specifics about the sex statistics of the Imperial Guard. But what we can say for sure is that there are a lot of women because nobody cares if those weaklings get killed by superior enemies, and maybe equipment is lighter in the future or something so it doesn't matter that the men are stronger'.
I mean, I know you're trying to make that sound hyperbolic, but the imperium probably doesn't expect you to win melee against orks regardless of sex, nor does it probably care how much extra gear you can carry so long as you can carry whatever the required kit is. The exact weight of which, to my knowledge, is unknown. I'd assume it probably varies from regiment to regiment and would thus probably be a weight that takes their recruiting pool into consideration.
The big difference here, I think, is that I'm not trying to assert a 50/50 split between men and women. I'm just rejecting other arguments that try to assert something like a 30/70 split.
My thought process is something like this:
The imperium wants bodies. It gets bodies, in part, by getting people to sign up for the guard. The more people it convinces to sign up, the easier it is to get the bodies it wants. So the starting point here is that the imperium, valuing bodies regardless of rude bits provide those bodies can meet the baseline requirements for soldiering, doesn't care about the sex of its recruits. Men and women both being welcomed as recruits is the default unless there's a compelling reason for one to be more welcome than the other. The main arguments presented for why men might be more welcomed so far seem to be:
* Cultural norms. I.e. women are seen as/encouraged to be caretakers resulting in a significant cultural bias against women becoming soldiers. However, I'm not aware of any evidence that supports the idea that this is the norm in the 41st millenium. It's true in the modern United States because we're only a couple generations removed from women not being allowed to vote, access their own bank accounts, 90s and early 2000s sitcom men get butthurt over their love interests being perceived as tougher than them, etc. But in a setting that has had 38,000+ years to change its paradigm, with a huge part of that time being spent in dire circumstances where aliens and demons are attacking and you can't be picky about who does the fighting... It makes more sense for there to NOT be a taboo against women warriors, nor does it make a lot of sense that women would be expected to be caretakers to a greater degree than men. For these reasons, the cultural norms argument doesn't hold up for me.
* Physical differences (especially in terms of physical strength.) The case here seems to be that being male means that, on average, you'll be a more desirable overall soldier due to your, on average, higher strength. Specific examples have included being able to carry your gear, dig trenches, and avoid stress injuries. As has been discussed, it seems likely that the imperium is generally just happy to have bodies. No one is particularly interested in how much you're exceeding the minimum requirements by; only that you meet the minimum requirements. Those minimum requirements don't seem to be especially demanding (see: men with leaner builds from some worlds being able to soldier perfectly well, possibly out of shape arbites being a thing, etc.), so it doesn't seem like this would be a deterrant for the women that are making the cut to join the guard. And concern about injuries resulting from long-term physical stress suggests that the imperium is expecting a large number of guardsmen to survive long enough in combat situations for such injuries to matter, which strikes me as kind of unlikely given the grim darkness and all. So unless we can find evidence that the minimum requirements for being a guardsman are beyond the abilities of an average female applicant, or unless we can find evidence that the imperial guard is reviewing stats/performances closely enough to care about physical strength in excess of the minimum requirements, this also seems like a weak argument.
So with neither of those arguments for women being less common than men in the guard being compelling, I'm left with the default position of assuming that the 'Guard is probably just happy to have bodies regardless of rude bits.
And that's without getting into hard-to-quantify evidence that there just... seem to be a decent number of women in the guard. In high ranks even which, given that only X% of your regiment is going to receive a higher rank, suggests that the number of women available to get promoted/assigned a higher rank is probably at least comparable to men.
tldr; the evidence for women being pretty common in the guard is that it makes sense the guard would be just as happy to accept women combined with the fact that there just... seem to be plenty of women. The argument for women being relatively rare is that the imperium of man, roughly 40,000 years in humanity's future, is still cleaving closely to societal norms that have been rapidly changing (at least in the United States) over the last century. Or that women will struggle with the physicality of the job despite us having plenty of examples of women in the 41st millenium not struggling with that sort of thing at all. (Be it due to the gear involved, the fact that humanity has such a huge population to pick from that they'll run out of openings before they run out of able-bodied women, or the requirements just not being all that demanding in the first place.)
Also regarding physical fitness: The Tanith Larkin is considered fit for service at above 60 years of age, with an amputated foot and a long history of psychological problems, hallucinations and migraines. And he was never particularly strong to begin with.
For reference, the C7A2 used by the Canadian Forces is 4.58KG with a scope and a full mag. The scope adds about 700G to the weight, so both weapons should weight relatively the same when the Lasgun gets its own external attachment.
Furthermore, there's a saying that nowadays soldiers carry more lighter gear than before, in that while gear is lighter (and less bulky) than it was, it just means they carry more of it and thus don't really carry less weight.
As for Heavy Weapons, well, there's a shared burden, but it's still quite the burden, even for something as ''light'' as the GPMG you're looking at one guy carrying the actual gun (11,6KG plus however many bullets in a sling you wanna keep on the gun), and some ammo, and the other carries the greater portion of the ammo as well as at least a spare barrel. Add a tripod that's about the weight of the gun if you're going to entrench somewhere, and a C7 for the assistant gunner, it adds quite a lot.
Yeah, I think the argument about Imperial equipment being lighter is a non-starter and a distraction from the overall topic. Typically, militaries load as much equipment onto their soldiers as they can- this is sometimes limited by availability of equipment rather than weight, but the Imperial Guard usually fields well-equipped soldiers as default. If individual equipment is lighter, troopsrs will be issued more stuff.
IIRC, historically this has pretty consistently capped out at about 50kg for maximum sustainable human-carried load incl. clothes, armour, weapons, survival gear etc. I'd expect more variability for Imperial populations due to differing population genetics and environmental factors. Armageddon, for example, has lower gravity than Earth, so troopers tithed from there may have lighter loads on other worlds. The mechanisation of the Steel Legions probably offsets this somewhat.
Re. Guard models not typically wearing packs- I'd take this as assault or defensive loads for expected combat, with packs left at camp, rather than indicative of overall loads carried by the soldiers day-to-day. Troopers historically have done this for expected combat actions.
Kanluwen wrote: Try meeting actual police officers rather than just watching TV shows? As much as I feel like police here in the US are woefully underqualified--it isn't from their exercise regimens.
I have. Actual police officers are precisely what I am basing my opinion on.
And security guards are hardly much better.
Andykp wrote: This is painful to read. So much misogynistic pseudoscience it’s crazy. Please re-read all of sgt smudges posts and they eloquently and concisely layout why your arguments are so weak.
Ah yes, back to head in the sand management.
What I wrote is just reality. If reality is "misogynistic pseudoscience", you better think about making a device that will transport you to My Little Pony or something.
Tyran wrote: I'm not even sure what are the positions to be honest.
I mean we know for a fact female guardsmen are a thing and all female IG Regiment are a thing.
Are female guardsmen less common than male ones? Probably, but less common when dealing with the IoM likely still means trillions upon trillions of female guardsmen.
And when it comes to famous IG worlds in which their whole thing is producing guardsmen regiments then I expect a pretty even 50/50 split.
OP was asking why we rarely see female-majority IG regiments in the books.
I explained that the reason is because books are largely inspired by real life, and in real life female soldiers are a rarity because of physical differences between men and women. And for elite units - which IG is, or at least is *supposed to be* - women will be even rarer.
Then a crowd appeared which hates that I don't agree with their pseudoscience of absolute equality and it snowballed from there.
They of course completely ignored the part where I said that I have no problem with things being different in the Imperium so long as there is a proper explanation as to why. If you want, give IG troops mandatory genetic enhancement - I don't care what, but the explanation has to exist. Right now however we see no indication of such being used en masse by Imperium, not even the power armor.
Andykp wrote: This is a good point, the whole boys are stronger/faster etc than girls argument becomes completely irrelevant in the 41st millennium. Even other human foes are juiced up on chaos devotion, most stuff you’ll fight is the stuff of nightmares. Even the strongest fittest humans is outmatched.
The thing with this discussion where it becomes toxic is the fact that people are happy to use real world justifications, which are clouded by real world prejudice but will ignore the in setting reality that flies against their argument altogether.
In universe mass conscription of both male and female population makes complete sense due to the total war of the setting. To ignore that only adds to the toxic feel of the community. The fact that the creators and owners of the setting are actively trying to increase inclusion in the background and models should be a clear signal the direction we are going. Female guard aren’t new, they are only recently getting models but have been around for ages in the fluff.
We should be encouraging as many people as possible to get involved with the hobby, gate keeping and and trying to discourage inclusion is not acceptable. I know the mods have received complaints from both “sides” but I feel it is a duty of anyone to call out and challenge gate keeping and the kind of misogyny we’ve seen in this thread. If we don’t then the community will never improve.
I showed this thread to my 12 year old daughter and she was appalled at the arguments in here. We really need to do better.
No, it is not irrelevant. You want to close the gap as much as possible - and as I said, main issue isn't even fighting. It is the other stuff - digging trenches, carrying wounded, and so on.
Mass conscription male and female makes sense for emergency PDF conscription in extremis. In reality however a society cannot sustain much more than 10-15% of population under arms for any prolonged period of time - and this percentage was true for Ancient Rome and is true today. So "mass conscription of both male and female population" still makes little sense, unless physically reasonably fit humans are rare overall. But I have seen no evidence that 85% of Imperial civilian population are starvation victims and/or McDonalds enjoyers.
I don't buy the "inclusion" argument. How many twelve-feet-tall greenskins do you see walking around in real life?
And if your reasoning is that of a 12 year old...
Sgt_Smudge wrote: Do you have sources for ANY of this, or are you just making up numbers?
Numbers are illustrative of the point. But I have already shown scientific sources which explain difference in physical performance between men and women. Do try and read them.
Congratulations, you realised why all this posturing about male bodies being strong is completely unnecessary.
Come on, if you are going to "debate" me, at least try and read what I am writing. Men have a multitude of advantages over women in combat, even in modern warfare, that have absolutely nothing to do with raw physical strength.
I'm sure all those bones will protect you from flesh-burrowing parasites, supercharged lasers, rocket propelled grenades, and weapons that atomise you. /s
The differences are frankly MINISCULE and wouldn't even be considered by recruitment. And we know this, because 1. We see women in the guard. 2. We see conscripts in the guard, literally used as cannon fodder. 3. There's plenty of regiments which recruit from pretty slight populations - Salvar-Chem Dogs and Tanith, etc.
You do understand that there are still things like shrapnel, blunt force impacts (e.g. weapons fire striking armor) and so on? And that armor cannot protect you from e.g. mobility injuries?
Female soldiers have been found to experience injuries at a higher rate, both in training [9, 10] and during operations [11, 12] when compared to their male colleagues, although this sex-based difference does not hold true across all military contexts and in some contexts male personnel have been observed to have higher injury rates than female personnel [13, 14]. There is also evidence that female soldiers may sustain injuries to different body sites when compared to male soldiers [15–17] and exhibit some differences in risk factors for injury, due to anthropometric, biomechanical, and anatomical differences. In basic training contexts where male and female recruits train together, despite males experiencing greater external training loads as measured by total distance covered, female soldiers tended to have a greater internal training load as measured by heart rate and ratings of perceived exertion and report more muscle soreness and fatigue [18].
Overall, for PDF it may make sense to aim for equal inclusion of men and women - when Orks are on the planet, you just need as many warm bodies as possible. But Imperial Guard? No.
I am extremely cautious about interpreting scientific publications for a politically-charged topic on an amateur discussion forum focussed on a fictional futuristic setting. I am not an expert in that area, and I have enough scientific literacy to know I shouldn't touch it with a 10-foot bargepole except in the most general way.
I think it is incontrovertible that sexual dimorphism exists in the real world, and has an impact of the endurance, strength, and fitness for certain tasks associated with modern military activity. However, I think to go into more detail than that is a fool's errand, especially on a forum that forbids political discussion. Any research discussing the impact of psychology or societal structure/culture on current recruiting practices is going to be heavily subject to political biases and even physical attributes can fall prey to this, although probably to a lesser degree. I do not have the toolset to correctly parse that. Stastically, I doubt anyone in this thread is a researcher into sexual dimorphism who does have that toolset, and a single such user is still subject to personal biases and is not in a situation where what they are saying is subject to peer review, although I could be persuaded if such a person was effectively calling out the limitations in the evidence they were presenting.
This is actually a pretty complex topic. Stating this is simply reality is reductive for an area with a lot of scientific debate.
Edit: this study is actually a perfect example of the pitfalls:
Female soldiers have been found to experience injuries at a higher rate, both in training [9, 10] and during operations [11, 12] when compared to their male colleagues, although this sex-based difference does not hold true across all military contexts and in some contexts male personnel have been observed to have higher injury rates than female personnel [13, 14]. There is also evidence that female soldiers may sustain injuries to different body sites when compared to male soldiers [15–17] and exhibit some differences in risk factors for injury, due to anthropometric, biomechanical, and anatomical differences. In basic training contexts where male and female recruits train together, despite males experiencing greater external training loads as measured by total distance covered, female soldiers tended to have a greater internal training load as measured by heart rate and ratings of perceived exertion and report more muscle soreness and fatigue [18].
Overall, for PDF it may make sense to aim for equal inclusion of men and women - when Orks are on the planet, you just need as many warm bodies as possible. But Imperial Guard? No.
Aldarion selectively quotes from the study background section, because it directly relates to their point- female soldiers experience injuries at a greater rate than male soldiers. But that isn't what the review is about- the review is looking at risk factors for female injuries. It points out, for multiple variables, that these risk factors differ noticeably from injury risk factors for male soldiers. So is the increased injury rate because women are inherently less suited to military service, or is it because the risk factors for injuries in female soldiers are less well understood and not mitigated as well by training regimens, selection criteria etc.?
I certainly don't know the answer to that, but it is clearly the case (at the time that article was written/published in 2022) that there is reasonable doubt over why the injury rate is greater. Hence why talking in only the vaguest terms is sensible.
OP was asking why we rarely see female-majority IG regiments in the books.
I explained that the reason is because books are largely inspired by real life, and in real life female soldiers are a rarity because of physical differences between men and women. And for elite units - which IG is, or at least is *supposed to be* - women will be even rarer.
Most 40k books focus on Space Marines that are literally one in a trillion as far as demographics are concerned. So no, this whole debate of demographic ratios have nothing to do with narrative focus.
Moreover some of the regimes everyone loves to write about like Cadians and Catachans pretty much the tell biology to feth off by having planets and societies in which everyone is a soldier (and an 80s walking meme in the case of Catachan), which you know probably wouldn't work in real life but it never really stopped them.
I think Cadia works if you treat the entire population as reservists that are part-time soldiers. 1/10th of the population is tithed off, so they must have a fairly high birth rate.
Grey Templar wrote:The argument is that the biological situation with women means that women are less likely to end up in the IG then men. Both because of women choosing not to enter the IG due to family obligations(IRL a man with a family is more likely to volunteer than a women with a family. There is zero reason to think the reasons for that are different in 40k) and also taking advantage of exceptions when people are getting drafted.
Yet again, an argument that stems primarily from CULTURAL issues and imposing our own cultural norms onto a society that is so removed from our own to frankly be alien.
Who cares if men IRL with families are more likely to volunteer? We don't live in the same society as a human in 40k. There is absolutely no reason why our cultural norms would remain, and frankly, you're showing a massive blind spot in your understanding of cultural studies and sociology.
For these reasons, it is entirely logical that the Imperium would still allow for exceptions to draft notices(requiring proof of course). These exceptions would logically include having children/being pregnant, etc... This would generate a few exceptions that men couldn't benefit from/would be less able to benefit from. IE: if a family has both parents get drafted, one of them can get out of it. The women is more likely to be the one to get out of it, be it because the man volunteers to be the one who goes or if its simply policy that if a women gets drafted she is ineligible if there are kids.
Actually, we have examples of women and men with children who are STILL drafted into the Guard, and the children are raised by the regiment (Tona and Caffran raising children in the Tanith 1st, for example). Again your comments regarding "the man is more likely to volunteer" is a CULTURAL argument, not a neutral condition
Yes, this assumes that most of the Imperium still has a culture where it is primarily women who take care of the children. Unless we have direct evidence that says its not the case however this should be our default since that is what the past and present tells us happens.
Counterpoint - you're claiming it exists. Prove that it does. Again, I repeat that GW's depiction of 40k tells us that all-women regiments and mixed-sex regiments are common enough, that women aren't prevented from joining most of the Imperium's institutions, and that *we don't see an indication of a homogenous stay-at-home-women culture across the Imperium*.
So, please - instead of continuing to claim that things must be congruent to the culture we happen to have right now, show me that this is the case. Your claim - your proof.
Finally, when we only consider people voluntarily joining the IG, again based on the real world, women are just less likely to volunteer.
Yes - a CULTURAL construct. A culture that we have no indication exists in 40k.
Why this is the case is not entirely clear and we could go on forever trying to find out, but it is a clear trend in the real world among all volunteer militaries. Women just so rarely volunteer for the army compared to men. They just don't want or feel compelled to join.
Sociologist and cultural scientists already HAVE hypothesised this - that it's primarily a result of cultural forces and factors, of what women are historically expected to do and be, the media consumed and who are depicted as soldiers, the language used, the forms of entertainment directed at people in their formative years, etc etc
Aka - CULTURE.
And again, we have no reason to believe that this has changed in 40k. You could come up with specific worlds where this isn't the case, but they'd be an exception.
Alternatively, we also have no reason to believe that it has stayed the same, and plenty of reason to believe it's changed - such as, yanno, 38,000 years passing, and the Imperium being DISPLAYED as different in many many ways.
It just means there aren't as many women in the armed forces, and by logical extrapolation the IG. This isn't a good or a bad thing. Its just a thing. Nobody should get offended by this.
The only thing that's offensive is your unwillingness to accept that 40k doesn't use the same logic as real life, and it makes all your points, which fundamentally rely on the belief that 40k shares IRL logic, unapplicable.
AldarionTelcontar wrote:What I wrote is just reality.
And we're in the 40k Background subforum. You can leave reality at the door.
OP was asking why we rarely see female-majority IG regiments in the books.
I explained that the reason is because books are largely inspired by real life, and in real life female soldiers are a rarity because of physical differences between men and women. And for elite units - which IG is, or at least is *supposed to be* - women will be even rarer.
Then a crowd appeared which hates that I don't agree with their pseudoscience of absolute equality and it snowballed from there.
They of course completely ignored the part where I said that I have no problem with things being different in the Imperium so long as there is a proper explanation as to why. If you want, give IG troops mandatory genetic enhancement - I don't care what, but the explanation has to exist. Right now however we see no indication of such being used en masse by Imperium, not even the power armor.
The explanation is "the Imperium doesn't care". I don't know why you can't wrap your head around that.
Again, I go again to your suggestion that "books are largely inspired by real life" - lolwut?? How? Why? Where? What part of 40k has given you that impression??
main issue isn't even fighting. It is the other stuff - digging trenches, carrying wounded, and so on.
So, explain soldiers like Larkin, Dorden, Domor or many of the Tanith. Explain the Salvar Chem-Dogs. Or the explicit mention of all-female and mixed sex regiments.
Mass conscription male and female makes sense for emergency PDF conscription in extremis. In reality however a society cannot sustain much more than 10-15% of population under arms for any prolonged period of time - and this percentage was true for Ancient Rome and is true today. So "mass conscription of both male and female population" still makes little sense, unless physically reasonably fit humans are rare overall. But I have seen no evidence that 85% of Imperial civilian population are starvation victims and/or McDonalds enjoyers.
"In reality" - yes, there's your problem. In reality, we don't have 12 foot tall greenskins, we don't warp powers, and we don't have Space Marines. So, drop it.
(oh, but your comment about 85% of the Imperium being starvation victims - have you SEEN the state of the Hive Cities? Not 85%, but it certainly ain't a small amount)
Sgt_Smudge wrote: Do you have sources for ANY of this, or are you just making up numbers?
Numbers are illustrative of the point.
As illustrative and accurate as a 5-year old's scribblings. They're not any sort of meaningful argument. They're numbers you pulled out of thin air. If you want anyone to take them seriously, use *actual* numbers, not arbitrary scales.
But I have already shown scientific sources which explain difference in physical performance between men and women. Do try and read them.
The ones that you've just been called out as misreading and misinterpreting the data in?
Second, if *you've* actually read those papers, then you'd actually be using non-arbitrary numbers instead of "women are under a 5, men are a 6" or whatever nonsense you made up.
Congratulations, you realised why all this posturing about male bodies being strong is completely unnecessary.
Come on, if you are going to "debate" me, at least try and read what I am writing. Men have a multitude of advantages over women in combat, even in modern warfare, that have absolutely nothing to do with raw physical strength.
And what advantages do those mean in the 41st millennium?
If this really is a debate, as you put it, explain to me why any real world logic is important in this discussion.
I'm sure all those bones will protect you from flesh-burrowing parasites, supercharged lasers, rocket propelled grenades, and weapons that atomise you. /s
The differences are frankly MINISCULE and wouldn't even be considered by recruitment. And we know this, because 1. We see women in the guard. 2. We see conscripts in the guard, literally used as cannon fodder. 3. There's plenty of regiments which recruit from pretty slight populations - Salvar-Chem Dogs and Tanith, etc.
You do understand that there are still things like shrapnel, blunt force impacts (e.g. weapons fire striking armor) and so on? And that armor cannot protect you from e.g. mobility injuries?
Ah, I'm sure the Catachans with their sleeveless flak vests are quaking about those concerns.
If these factors really were so meaningful, then explain the disparity between Tanith Guardsmen, Cadian Guardsmen, and Catachan Guardsmen, and how they're all rolled under the same banner.
Again, all I'm saying is that *GW doesn't recognise any distinction, and includes plenty of women in their regiments, both mono-sex and mixed.* For all your talk of the real world, neither GW or I care. If you can't discuss 40k without relying on IRL logic, and without acknowledging that 40k frequently abandons IRL logic, this discussion is not going to go anywhere.
Grey Templar wrote:The argument is that the biological situation with women means that women are less likely to end up in the IG then men. Both because of women choosing not to enter the IG due to family obligations(IRL a man with a family is more likely to volunteer than a women with a family. There is zero reason to think the reasons for that are different in 40k) and also taking advantage of exceptions when people are getting drafted.
Yet again, an argument that stems primarily from CULTURAL issues and imposing our own cultural norms onto a society that is so removed from our own to frankly be alien.
Who cares if men IRL with families are more likely to volunteer? We don't live in the same society as a human in 40k. There is absolutely no reason why our cultural norms would remain, and frankly, you're showing a massive blind spot in your understanding of cultural studies and sociology.
The impetus is on YOU to show that the Imperium's culture has drifted from what exists in the modern day. The modern day and the past is the baseline, the default assumption for human culture. It is the baseline because Warhammer 40k is our universe in the future.
For these reasons, it is entirely logical that the Imperium would still allow for exceptions to draft notices(requiring proof of course). These exceptions would logically include having children/being pregnant, etc... This would generate a few exceptions that men couldn't benefit from/would be less able to benefit from. IE: if a family has both parents get drafted, one of them can get out of it. The women is more likely to be the one to get out of it, be it because the man volunteers to be the one who goes or if its simply policy that if a women gets drafted she is ineligible if there are kids.
Actually, we have examples of women and men with children who are STILL drafted into the Guard, and the children are raised by the regiment (Tona and Caffran raising children in the Tanith 1st, for example). Again your comments regarding "the man is more likely to volunteer" is a CULTURAL argument, not a neutral condition
Yes, this assumes that most of the Imperium still has a culture where it is primarily women who take care of the children. Unless we have direct evidence that says its not the case however this should be our default since that is what the past and present tells us happens.
Counterpoint - you're claiming it exists. Prove that it does. Again, I repeat that GW's depiction of 40k tells us that all-women regiments and mixed-sex regiments are common enough, that women aren't prevented from joining most of the Imperium's institutions, and that *we don't see an indication of a homogenous stay-at-home-women culture across the Imperium*.
So, please - instead of continuing to claim that things must be congruent to the culture we happen to have right now, show me that this is the case. Your claim - your proof.
The proof for my claim is the real world. Again, 40k is meant to be our world in the far future. You are counter-claiming that things have changed "just because". The burden is on you, not me, to show that is the case.
Finally, when we only consider people voluntarily joining the IG, again based on the real world, women are just less likely to volunteer.
Yes - a CULTURAL construct. A culture that we have no indication exists in 40k.
Why this is the case is not entirely clear and we could go on forever trying to find out, but it is a clear trend in the real world among all volunteer militaries. Women just so rarely volunteer for the army compared to men. They just don't want or feel compelled to join.
Sociologist and cultural scientists already HAVE hypothesised this - that it's primarily a result of cultural forces and factors, of what women are historically expected to do and be, the media consumed and who are depicted as soldiers, the language used, the forms of entertainment directed at people in their formative years, etc etc
Aka - CULTURE.
And again, we have no reason to believe that this has changed in 40k. You could come up with specific worlds where this isn't the case, but they'd be an exception.
Alternatively, we also have no reason to believe that it has stayed the same, and plenty of reason to believe it's changed - such as, yanno, 38,000 years passing, and the Imperium being DISPLAYED as different in many many ways.
You seem of the delusion that culture exists in a vacuum separate from biology. It does not. It would constantly reinforce itself on culture, and culture would then reinforce its own norms.
If it had no effect on cultural practices, then why does the trend of male vs female behavior tend to be shockingly similar across cultures that have had no contact for thousand or even hundreds of thousands of years. Why are traditionally male vs female roles remarkably similar in the Andes mountains as they are in most African societies? The only possible explanation is that humans are predisposed towards male/female role distribution, and even in societies which have minimal/no barriers to the free choice of individuals there are still trends in decision making which follow this pattern.
Given that more time has passed in the separation of many societies on Earth than has passed between today and the time of Warhammer 40k I am confidant in these norms have the ability to survive the millennia.
It just means there aren't as many women in the armed forces, and by logical extrapolation the IG. This isn't a good or a bad thing. Its just a thing. Nobody should get offended by this.
The only thing that's offensive is your unwillingness to accept that 40k doesn't use the same logic as real life, and it makes all your points, which fundamentally rely on the belief that 40k shares IRL logic, unapplicable.
AldarionTelcontar wrote:What I wrote is just reality.
And we're in the 40k Background subforum. You can leave reality at the door.
Then what even is the point of a discussion? Since we can't use anything from reality here. How about you leave your obsession with strict equality at the door? 40k is a nightmare realm of chaos and torment, equality can feth right off.
No, reality is a perfectly acceptable reference point. Otherwise there are no reference points for anything and even talking would be pointless without it. Saying leave reality at the door doesn't help your case, it just makes you sound crazy.
Again, all I'm saying is that *GW doesn't recognise any distinction, and includes plenty of women in their regiments, both mono-sex and mixed.* For all your talk of the real world, neither GW or I care. If you can't discuss 40k without relying on IRL logic, and without acknowledging that 40k frequently abandons IRL logic, this discussion is not going to go anywhere.
Just because 40k is not always internally consistent doesn't mean we can never use logic ever.
And I think you do care, otherwise you wouldn't be screaming that we must abandon all logic when talking about 40k and can never reference the real world ever. 40k is just a gritty grimdark sci-fi, not a Lewis Carrol acid trip. The latter is devoid of logic, the former can still have logic and deductive reasoning applied to figure out how it might work if it was IRL. If you can't do that, then there is no fun to be had with trying to find out how the setting works. What makes it tick. Because we can't use logic, that would be insane!!!
Grey Templar wrote: [...]
Finally, when we only consider people voluntarily joining the IG, again based on the real world, women are just less likely to volunteer. [...]
One interesting question here is, as someone mentioned earlier: life in the imperium oftentimes REAALLLLY sucks. And while there are several regions on todays earth where volunteering is rare, there are others were it is more common, especially when being in the military means you at least get some food and water. Then one has to consider that some of those regions, where serving in the military is a possible escape from poverty, don't allow or at least heavily restrict women serving in the military. Even before any performance tests are made.
My point basically is: if we would live in a grimdark dystopia and the option to join the guard is there for both sexes, it might be a lot more desirable for women then we see on todays earth. Tona Creed in the Gaunts Ghosts Novels come to mind, as do the Vergastine militia women. They were in a battle zone against an enemy that did not care that they are women. So one might as well have a gun than just lay down and die.
Regarding standards and conscription: as someone who was amongst the last cohorts being conscripted around here: the entry bar for that was really low in Germany at least. Sure there was some stuff that got you disqualified, mostly old injuries or preconditions that might turn worse when serving, forcing the state to pay for the former conscript which is not really an issue in WH40k. But on the whole I saw several young men being conscripted that... well lets just say that the system wasn't particularly picky. You could be short, fat, have bad eysight, bad hearing, allergic... Would they have had a general draft of both sexes back then, they would definitly have taken at least some women.
An actually good counterpoint. I would expect that the volunteer rates would be high and more evenly distributed on worlds where life sucks especially hard. I would expect that hive worlds in general would have a much higher and even ratio of women than regiments from standard Imperial worlds or more rural places.
However, I am skeptical of how often conditions in a hive world would be absolutely horrendous. I would guess that most of the time, assuming that food shipments from offworld haven't been interrupted, hives are at least decent-ish places to live for the bulk of people. Water and food are available at least enough to get by, and work is probably not hard to find either.
My head-canon is that hives go through boom and bust cycles covering periods of a few centuries where their population grows, outstrips the food supply, has a period of famine where the population thins down, and then once its stabilized it recovers again. Life in a hive would suck during the famine and then be pretty good once its recovered. So really it would depend on at what point in such a cycle a hive world is at. A smart governor would recruit people during those famine periods, but I would expect the Imperium to be too inept to properly manage these cycles.
I think the biggest source for cultures being different is the lore stating the Imperium consists of a patchwork of myriad cultures,and the specific examples we have of weird cultures. Necromunda is a bizarre place by our cultural standards. Cadia is an insanely militarised culture of extreme military dedication and service that makes Sparta look tame. There are more examples.
Grey Templar wrote: [
An actually good counterpoint. I would expect that the volunteer rates would be high and more evenly distributed on worlds where life sucks especially hard. I would expect that hive worlds in general would have a much higher and even ratio of women than regiments from standard Imperial worlds or more rural places.
However, I am skeptical of how often conditions in a hive world would be absolutely horrendous. I would guess that most of the time, assuming that food shipments from offworld haven't been interrupted, hives are at least decent-ish places to live for the bulk of people. Water and food are available at least enough to get by, and work is probably not hard to find either.
My head-canon is that hives go through boom and bust cycles covering periods of a few centuries where their population grows, outstrips the food supply, has a period of famine where the population thins down, and then once its stabilized it recovers again. Life in a hive would suck during the famine and then be pretty good once its recovered. So really it would depend on at what point in such a cycle a hive world is at. A smart governor would recruit people during those famine periods, but I would expect the Imperium to be too inept to properly manage these cycles.
It seems the typical approach on hive worlds is to use the tithe as a pressure valve to remove malcontents and dissidents from the world- basically underhive scum. Helpfully these gangs typically already have combat experience. The majority of the hive living in... livable to reasonable conditions are the productive workers and not the pool you want to recruit from.
Tithes often seem to be stated in annual terms (presumably Terran standard years), but don't seem to necessarily be collected on an annual basis. A large tithe "saved up" and collected every few decades or even centuries is plausible.
Some kind of Munitorum Manual to cover the tithe and explain it a bit more.
By all means fill it with contradictions, errors and omissions. But I’d love to read something like that.
It be especially hilarious if they added a differrent "typo" to each new edition, like adding a zero to the number tithed from an example or something that makes no sense, rather than doing straight reprints.
Grey Templar wrote:The argument is that the biological situation with women means that women are less likely to end up in the IG then men. Both because of women choosing not to enter the IG due to family obligations(IRL a man with a family is more likely to volunteer than a women with a family. There is zero reason to think the reasons for that are different in 40k) and also taking advantage of exceptions when people are getting drafted.
Yet again, an argument that stems primarily from CULTURAL issues and imposing our own cultural norms onto a society that is so removed from our own to frankly be alien.
Who cares if men IRL with families are more likely to volunteer? We don't live in the same society as a human in 40k. There is absolutely no reason why our cultural norms would remain, and frankly, you're showing a massive blind spot in your understanding of cultural studies and sociology.
The impetus is on YOU to show that the Imperium's culture has drifted from what exists in the modern day. The modern day and the past is the baseline, the default assumption for human culture. It is the baseline because Warhammer 40k is our universe in the future
I'd argue that the lore very well shows that the culture of the Imperium is different all the time.
How many cultures today in the western world would stand or justify the lobotomising of a person so that they can be made into a servitor? Or the chain creation of thousands of apparently braindead clones to create servitors? Heck Servitors are something right out of a horror film - all wires and gears and flesh melted and melted today into quite a horrific display. And yet in the Imperium they are very normal and accepted. As are flying skulls; the fact that human brains are used in cogitation machines.
That alone suggests that their culture and social morals and ideals are different from today's western world.
If you want even more contrast consider that many of the social and gender roles afforded to women in the setting are impossible for women in modern day "non-western nations". Again showing that the culture of the Earth today is not a singular thing (of course the same is also true of the Imperium)
For these reasons, it is entirely logical that the Imperium would still allow for exceptions to draft notices(requiring proof of course). These exceptions would logically include having children/being pregnant, etc... This would generate a few exceptions that men couldn't benefit from/would be less able to benefit from. IE: if a family has both parents get drafted, one of them can get out of it. The women is more likely to be the one to get out of it, be it because the man volunteers to be the one who goes or if its simply policy that if a women gets drafted she is ineligible if there are kids.
Actually, we have examples of women and men with children who are STILL drafted into the Guard, and the children are raised by the regiment (Tona and Caffran raising children in the Tanith 1st, for example). Again your comments regarding "the man is more likely to volunteer" is a CULTURAL argument, not a neutral condition
Yes, this assumes that most of the Imperium still has a culture where it is primarily women who take care of the children. Unless we have direct evidence that says its not the case however this should be our default since that is what the past and present tells us happens.
Counterpoint - you're claiming it exists. Prove that it does. Again, I repeat that GW's depiction of 40k tells us that all-women regiments and mixed-sex regiments are common enough, that women aren't prevented from joining most of the Imperium's institutions, and that *we don't see an indication of a homogenous stay-at-home-women culture across the Imperium*.
So, please - instead of continuing to claim that things must be congruent to the culture we happen to have right now, show me that this is the case. Your claim - your proof.
The proof for my claim is the real world. Again, 40k is meant to be our world in the far future. You are counter-claiming that things have changed "just because". The burden is on you, not me, to show that is the case..
Actually its interesting to note that "stay at home fathers" are a thing that's on the rise in some western nations right now. Indeed it might well be that the only thing preventing that as a cultural shift is the cost of living and financial pressures which are instead resulting in a care system developing (because of the breakup of the family unit) whilst both parents go to work. The guard are simply taking that one step further and basically the kids go into foster care/very long boarding school whilst both their parents are drafted/voluntary signup. Heck upper classes in the past raised their kids on boarding schools and nannies and whilst it seems to be less of a thing today, its certainly still there for some.
You seem of the delusion that culture exists in a vacuum separate from biology. It does not. It would constantly reinforce itself on culture, and culture would then reinforce its own norms.
If it had no effect on cultural practices, then why does the trend of male vs female behaviour tend to be shockingly similar across cultures that have had no contact for thousand or even hundreds of thousands of years. Why are traditionally male vs female roles remarkably similar in the Andes mountains as they are in most African societies? The only possible explanation is that humans are predisposed towards male/female role distribution, and even in societies which have minimal/no barriers to the free choice of individuals there are still trends in decision making which follow this pattern.
Given that more time has passed in the separation of many societies on Earth than has passed between today and the time of Warhammer 40k I am confidant in these norms have the ability to survive the millennia.
This is a "Nature VS Nurture" argument and we are still arguing over that one as to where the line is. Biology and Culture is similar in that both influence the other, but how much one influences the other is very hard to draw the line on. In part because our ability to interpret our biology and behaviour is shaped by our culture. So the science that allows us to study this whole topic is very much shaped by the cultural and biological elements that make us up. But again we can point at real world current cultures and show that there are vast differences between male and female rights and influences. There's also rising evidence of ancient cultures having less of a gender job divide and we have to remember at one time there was no singular "home" to come back to.
In the end we can certainly extrapolate many things about ancient and modern cultures and peoples and transpose them into the 40K setting. However we also have to accept that the cultures of the far future are not the same as they are today. Even when we ignore the vast variety that is present in the setting; there are many cultural and social norms that Imperial Citizens engage with en-mass that would not be tolerated/allowed/present in modern day society.
Necromunda is essentially a recycling world. Scraping up the leavings of previous generations, including their bodies, and making something new from the abundant decay.
The citizens also face a harsh lifestyle, and have done for untold millennia. And that’s before we head into the Underhive. That’s naturally going to toughen the citizens up.
Now, it’s entirely possible a largely Modern Earth type world or worlds exist out there. But it’s still going to be subject to a Dictatorship, under the Imperial Governor. That’s just part and parcel of being in The Imperium.
Cultural differences can and will exist on such a world. Again we can look to Necromunda as a well documented in-universe planet to confirm that. The Clan Houses all demonstrate that is a thing.
Some worlds may have a taboo about women serving in the military, and only accept male recruits.
But of the worlds I’m familiar with in the background? I can’t immediately think of any. Right of Succession among the nobility isn’t First Born Male. Or even First Born. And it’s only very rarely any kind of democratic process (closest would be a council of Nobles putting forward a candidate for Imperial approval).
And that is the great joy of 40K. Very little is confirmed. Very little is expressly forbidden. Even the constants are wonderfully inconsistent.
So if you want your Guard Regiment to only recruit men or women? Go for it.
But when you bring up real world stuff as justification? I completely reserve the right to laugh at you. It’s entirely unnecessary to do justify your own background for your own army.
The citizens also face a harsh lifestyle, and have done for untold millennia. And that’s before we head into the Underhive. That’s naturally going to toughen the citizens up.
Actually if we consider what the Underhive is, it should have the opposite effect. Generations of radiation, pollution, poor living standards and all would likely result in a very weak population that would be short lived and likely experience great pains and suffering. They wouldn't be a semi-thriving civilization who's only barrier to being uplifted is basically internal gang fighting and politics.
The concept of "suffering breeds strength" is an extreme exaggeration of some real world examples; taken to 11 (as most things are in 40K). Very much the same as how we saw the same with the Fremen and Emperor's army in Dune. It's the extreme take of "that which does not kill me, makes me stronger"; in a very blunt muscle and physical aspect.
Which feeds into the hypothetical that between right now and 40K? Well, 30k…the Golden Age of Man saw significant genetic tinkering to strengthen and fine tune a given population to the environment it faced.
This is exactly what was done with the Kin - to the point they can be interpreted as an entirely artificial species, originally created and cloned by the STC’s that would become the Votann, from genetic information and like….genesoup loaded in at the point of departure.
Now that itself is an extreme interpretation, and I’m not suggesting “therefore all extant human or Abhuman populations”. I’m just using Kin as a clear and visible example of such genetic tinkering.
The result there is due to the very extreme environment they were inhabiting. But when you’re off to worlds unknown? Basic genetic tinkering to close the dimorphism in “entirely naturally made “ humans really isn’t a bad idea at all, and you might as well make that tweak whilst ensuring the future generations are well adapted to the exact mix of air, gravity, nutrition sources etc. After all, setting a new colony is going to be an All Hands On Deck affair.
Given what we know the STC could, (and in the case of the Kin, still) do? Those do not seem terribly extreme, and wouldn’t necessarily result in externally visible differences.
Can I prove that was definitely done? No. Because as above, the background is rarely anything like that definitive. But it seems a suitably pragmatic approach. Why wait for your nascent colony to adapt to local environs, when you can tailor those changes pretty rapidly, and so far as we know, every STC was perfectly capable of doing just that.
The citizens also face a harsh lifestyle, and have done for untold millennia. And that’s before we head into the Underhive. That’s naturally going to toughen the citizens up.
Actually if we consider what the Underhive is, it should have the opposite effect. Generations of radiation, pollution, poor living standards and all would likely result in a very weak population that would be short lived and likely experience great pains and suffering. They wouldn't be a semi-thriving civilization who's only barrier to being uplifted is basically internal gang fighting and politics.
The concept of "suffering breeds strength" is an extreme exaggeration of some real world examples; taken to 11 (as most things are in 40K). Very much the same as how we saw the same with the Fremen and Emperor's army in Dune. It's the extreme take of "that which does not kill me, makes me stronger"; in a very blunt muscle and physical aspect.
Yes, but as this is fiction then what is thematically cool matters more than what would realistically happen. So if we think that a harsh planet producing a bunch of badasses is cool, then that happens regardless of what is realistic.
And that goes for the whole topic. Arguing about (dubious) realism is rather besides the point. In 40K rule of cool triumphs over realism with laughable ease. So if we think female IG is cool (and why wouldn't we?) then that's all we need to know.
The citizens also face a harsh lifestyle, and have done for untold millennia. And that’s before we head into the Underhive. That’s naturally going to toughen the citizens up.
Actually if we consider what the Underhive is, it should have the opposite effect. Generations of radiation, pollution, poor living standards and all would likely result in a very weak population that would be short lived and likely experience great pains and suffering. They wouldn't be a semi-thriving civilization who's only barrier to being uplifted is basically internal gang fighting and politics.
The concept of "suffering breeds strength" is an extreme exaggeration of some real world examples; taken to 11 (as most things are in 40K). Very much the same as how we saw the same with the Fremen and Emperor's army in Dune. It's the extreme take of "that which does not kill me, makes me stronger"; in a very blunt muscle and physical aspect.
Yes, but as this is fiction then what is thematically cool matters more than what would realistically happen. So if we think that a harsh planet producing a bunch of badasses is cool, then that happens regardless of what is realistic.
And that goes for the whole topic. Arguing about (dubious) realism is rather besides the point. In 40K rule of cool triumphs over realism with laughable ease. So if we think female IG is cool (and why wouldn't we?) then that's all we need to know.
Indeed, but fiction that grounds itself on some elements of reality is even better. Hence Mad Doc's proposal that humanity of the 40K era has had is genetics "tinkered" with on some level to allow them to thrive in hostile environments that would kill regular humans of our age.
Of course we also have things like the Warp mucking up stuff too. Who's to say what genetic and physiological changes that has created on humanity at large which might not be realised. There's certainly ample scope in the setting for the people to be physically more capable than humanity is today.
The citizens also face a harsh lifestyle, and have done for untold millennia. And that’s before we head into the Underhive. That’s naturally going to toughen the citizens up.
Actually if we consider what the Underhive is, it should have the opposite effect. Generations of radiation, pollution, poor living standards and all would likely result in a very weak population that would be short lived and likely experience great pains and suffering. They wouldn't be a semi-thriving civilization who's only barrier to being uplifted is basically internal gang fighting and politics.
The concept of "suffering breeds strength" is an extreme exaggeration of some real world examples; taken to 11 (as most things are in 40K). Very much the same as how we saw the same with the Fremen and Emperor's army in Dune. It's the extreme take of "that which does not kill me, makes me stronger"; in a very blunt muscle and physical aspect.
Yes, but as this is fiction then what is thematically cool matters more than what would realistically happen. So if we think that a harsh planet producing a bunch of badasses is cool, then that happens regardless of what is realistic.
And that goes for the whole topic. Arguing about (dubious) realism is rather besides the point. In 40K rule of cool triumphs over realism with laughable ease. So if we think female IG is cool (and why wouldn't we?) then that's all we need to know.
Having acknowledged that basis of 40k though, I personally enjoy trying to figure out how such lunacies could work within what we know of 40k lore, and what extant in-universe technologies/warp shananigans could explain the reality-breaking features. For example, MDGs plausible musings on DAoT genetic tinkering leading to humanity thriving where it should be barely surviving. Very plausible considering the Emperor's fear that baseline humanity no longer still existed by the Great Crusade, and that basically all human populations may be tinkered with.
Edit: looks like Overread ninja'd me with almost the same point
Kanluwen wrote: Try meeting actual police officers rather than just watching TV shows? As much as I feel like police here in the US are woefully underqualified--it isn't from their exercise regimens.
I have. Actual police officers are precisely what I am basing my opinion on.
And security guards are hardly much better.
Andykp wrote: This is painful to read. So much misogynistic pseudoscience it’s crazy. Please re-read all of sgt smudges posts and they eloquently and concisely layout why your arguments are so weak.
Ah yes, back to head in the sand management.
What I wrote is just reality. If reality is "misogynistic pseudoscience", you better think about making a device that will transport you to My Little Pony or something.
Tyran wrote: I'm not even sure what are the positions to be honest.
I mean we know for a fact female guardsmen are a thing and all female IG Regiment are a thing.
Are female guardsmen less common than male ones? Probably, but less common when dealing with the IoM likely still means trillions upon trillions of female guardsmen.
And when it comes to famous IG worlds in which their whole thing is producing guardsmen regiments then I expect a pretty even 50/50 split.
OP was asking why we rarely see female-majority IG regiments in the books.
I explained that the reason is because books are largely inspired by real life, and in real life female soldiers are a rarity because of physical differences between men and women. And for elite units - which IG is, or at least is *supposed to be* - women will be even rarer.
Then a crowd appeared which hates that I don't agree with their pseudoscience of absolute equality and it snowballed from there.
They of course completely ignored the part where I said that I have no problem with things being different in the Imperium so long as there is a proper explanation as to why. If you want, give IG troops mandatory genetic enhancement - I don't care what, but the explanation has to exist. Right now however we see no indication of such being used en masse by Imperium, not even the power armor.
Andykp wrote: This is a good point, the whole boys are stronger/faster etc than girls argument becomes completely irrelevant in the 41st millennium. Even other human foes are juiced up on chaos devotion, most stuff you’ll fight is the stuff of nightmares. Even the strongest fittest humans is outmatched.
The thing with this discussion where it becomes toxic is the fact that people are happy to use real world justifications, which are clouded by real world prejudice but will ignore the in setting reality that flies against their argument altogether.
In universe mass conscription of both male and female population makes complete sense due to the total war of the setting. To ignore that only adds to the toxic feel of the community. The fact that the creators and owners of the setting are actively trying to increase inclusion in the background and models should be a clear signal the direction we are going. Female guard aren’t new, they are only recently getting models but have been around for ages in the fluff.
We should be encouraging as many people as possible to get involved with the hobby, gate keeping and and trying to discourage inclusion is not acceptable. I know the mods have received complaints from both “sides” but I feel it is a duty of anyone to call out and challenge gate keeping and the kind of misogyny we’ve seen in this thread. If we don’t then the community will never improve.
I showed this thread to my 12 year old daughter and she was appalled at the arguments in here. We really need to do better.
No, it is not irrelevant. You want to close the gap as much as possible - and as I said, main issue isn't even fighting. It is the other stuff - digging trenches, carrying wounded, and so on.
Mass conscription male and female makes sense for emergency PDF conscription in extremis. In reality however a society cannot sustain much more than 10-15% of population under arms for any prolonged period of time - and this percentage was true for Ancient Rome and is true today. So "mass conscription of both male and female population" still makes little sense, unless physically reasonably fit humans are rare overall. But I have seen no evidence that 85% of Imperial civilian population are starvation victims and/or McDonalds enjoyers.
I don't buy the "inclusion" argument. How many twelve-feet-tall greenskins do you see walking around in real life?
And if your reasoning is that of a 12 year old...
Sgt_Smudge wrote: Do you have sources for ANY of this, or are you just making up numbers?
Numbers are illustrative of the point. But I have already shown scientific sources which explain difference in physical performance between men and women. Do try and read them.
Congratulations, you realised why all this posturing about male bodies being strong is completely unnecessary.
Come on, if you are going to "debate" me, at least try and read what I am writing. Men have a multitude of advantages over women in combat, even in modern warfare, that have absolutely nothing to do with raw physical strength.
I'm sure all those bones will protect you from flesh-burrowing parasites, supercharged lasers, rocket propelled grenades, and weapons that atomise you. /s
The differences are frankly MINISCULE and wouldn't even be considered by recruitment. And we know this, because 1. We see women in the guard. 2. We see conscripts in the guard, literally used as cannon fodder. 3. There's plenty of regiments which recruit from pretty slight populations - Salvar-Chem Dogs and Tanith, etc.
You do understand that there are still things like shrapnel, blunt force impacts (e.g. weapons fire striking armor) and so on? And that armor cannot protect you from e.g. mobility injuries?
Female soldiers have been found to experience injuries at a higher rate, both in training [9, 10] and during operations [11, 12] when compared to their male colleagues, although this sex-based difference does not hold true across all military contexts and in some contexts male personnel have been observed to have higher injury rates than female personnel [13, 14]. There is also evidence that female soldiers may sustain injuries to different body sites when compared to male soldiers [15–17] and exhibit some differences in risk factors for injury, due to anthropometric, biomechanical, and anatomical differences. In basic training contexts where male and female recruits train together, despite males experiencing greater external training loads as measured by total distance covered, female soldiers tended to have a greater internal training load as measured by heart rate and ratings of perceived exertion and report more muscle soreness and fatigue [18].
Overall, for PDF it may make sense to aim for equal inclusion of men and women - when Orks are on the planet, you just need as many warm bodies as possible. But Imperial Guard? No.
Mate, if a 12 year old can see how dumb your argument is and can see the misogyny in what your saying they it doesn’t look good for you.
The guard relies on numbers, it always has, it’s not a solute fighting force. It’s mass mobilisation of the people to swamp and grind down the enemy.
And regardless of what real life bias you want to apply to the hobby the company that makes it clearly is going in a different direction. All NEW guard releases, be they models, books or art contain a high proportion of female frontline soldiers. And guess what, they perform as well as the male ones.
And your comment about inclusion and Greenskins, clearly demonstrates you have no idea how inclusion actually works outside the horror stories you’ve heard on Fox News.
Andykp wrote: And regardless of what real life bias you want to apply to the hobby the company that makes it clearly is going in a different direction. All guard releases, be they models, books or art contain a high proportion of female frontline soldiers.
What are we classing as a 'high proportion' here?
Because looking at the models range(s), for example:
2nd ed. Cadians - all dudes
3rd ed. Cadians - all dudes
new Cadians - ~30% (?) female if you max out on the heads
Tallarn - all dudes
Vostroyans - all dudes
Steel Legion - all dudes
Valhallans - all dudes
Mordians - all dudes
Praetorians - all dudes
Forge World Death Korps - all dudes
new Death Korps - all dudes
Elysians - all dudes
Catachans - 1 female (metal grenade launcher)
Other/Misc - 4 (?) female (Warrior Woman, Raine, recent BL Cadian officer, metal Tanith lasgun)
I'm not sure about the most recent Codex: Astra Militarum, but across all prior editions, you could probably count the number of female soldiers depicted in artwork on one hand (I can think of two...)
It seems to be more that the most recent batch of Cadians specifically has a relatively high proportion of females; but that's probably to be expected given the proportion of the population of the world under arms.
IIRC, historically this has pretty consistently capped out at about 50kg for maximum sustainable human-carried load incl. clothes, armour, weapons, survival gear etc...
Pounds, not kg. Historically, soldiers have carried 36 kg or less. General rule of thumb is a soldier can carry about 1/3 to 1/2 of his bodyweight on an approach march and still be able to do something when he gets to the fight. Above that and you start breaking them down and reducing their ability to fight. It's not a new problem.
Where is that weight actually coming from? What is in the kit that is creating that weight?
How does a modern armies logistical considerations compare to that of the Imperium?
For instance, a Mechanised Regiment of Imperial Guard are going to have their Chimeras and support vehicles for carting their kit about. Specialist Regiments in the vein of Catachan’s seem expected to live off the land. A Drop Regiment is intended to be kept mobile, going in and out via their Valkyries or equivalent. A planetary or orbital Garrison is…well…a Garrison.
Those are all going to change what is physically demanded of a given member of the Imperial Guard.
So even from a world with a strict 50/50 mix? It’s not out of the question that’s factored in to how a Regiment is expected/intended to operate.
And again? We have no reason at all to believe any dimorphism isn’t addressed through training, drugs, genetic tinkering in ages past etc.
Because if your sole argument remains “but in the modern world”? You better forget your Lasguns, your Warp Travel, your Valkyrie’s, your Sentinels, your Ogryns, your Rough Riders, your Ratlings and so on.
new Cadians - ~30% (?) female if you max out on the heads
It seems to be more that the most recent batch of Cadians specifically has a relatively high proportion of females; but that's probably to be expected given the proportion of the population of the world under arms.
And conveniently matches up exactly with what I've been saying. ~30% women is about what you would expect if you applied what we see in the real world if the Imperium is overall an egalitarian society.
GW model options confirm roughly 30% women in the IG.
I'm not sure the models are a great reference. Pretty sure the new and old eldar guardian kits lean towards more men than women even though their lore is pretty explicit that eldar expect every citizen regardless of sex to be able to serve as guardians.
Unless there's a thus far unmentioned massive gender gap in the eldar population.
Where is that weight actually coming from? What is in the kit that is creating that weight?
How does a modern armies logistical considerations compare to that of the Imperium?
For instance, a Mechanised Regiment of Imperial Guard are going to have their Chimeras and support vehicles for carting their kit about. Specialist Regiments in the vein of Catachan’s seem expected to live off the land. A Drop Regiment is intended to be kept mobile, going in and out via their Valkyries or equivalent. A planetary or orbital Garrison is…well…a Garrison.
Those are all going to change what is physically demanded of a given member of the Imperial Guard.
So even from a world with a strict 50/50 mix? It’s not out of the question that’s factored in to how a Regiment is expected/intended to operate.
And again? We have no reason at all to believe any dimorphism isn’t addressed through training, drugs, genetic tinkering in ages past etc.
Because if your sole argument remains “but in the modern world”? You better forget your Lasguns, your Warp Travel, your Valkyrie’s, your Sentinels, your Ogryns, your Rough Riders, your Ratlings and so on.
Lasgun (plus spare packs), body armour, helmet, water, entrenching tools, comms equipment, ammunition for any special weapons (e.g. the flamers have pretty hefty fuel tanks).
Not to mention that both the new Cadians and the plastic Kriegers have some pretty hefty backpacks. It all adds up.
Modern armies have vehicles and go for a manoeuvrist approach as well and yet they still carry around a ton of heavy stuff. Heck western forces are probably better supported than guard in that regard as we actually care for our personnel’s lives and welfare.
WRT dimorphism - women feature prominently in plenty of BL novels and the descriptions generally imply the dimorphism is broadly similar to irl (though with more and greater outliers).
If you’re using drugs to counteract it, why not just use the same drugs to make already strong people stronger? The Imperium has no overall driver* to artificially skew things one way or the other.
There’s clearly lots of women in the guard. There’s clearly both all female and mixed sex regiments. The impression GW gives in models, lore and art (even now when they’re trying hard to appeal more to women) though is that there are less women than men. How much by we can’t really tell, though if the new Cadians are at 30%, that’s probably roughly what GW are thinking. (Fwiw, I probably would have guesstimated somewhere in the 30-40% region. Enough that they don’t seem at all rare, but still a significant skew).
The M-G Short Pattern Lasgun, featured in the Imperial Infantryman’s Uplifting Primer is 2.3kg. And Wikipedia suggest the USA M4 Carbine is 2.9kg as is, or 3.52kg with 30 rounds and a sling. The XM7 is apparently heftier, coming in at 3.8kg
Even if we assume the M-G’s proffered weight is without a power pack installed, we can start to see a genuine disparity in the weight.
Whilst sources vary, you can get between 40 to 150 and more shots for a Lasgun power pack. So two soldiers, with broadly similar battlefield role, equipment and overall ammo? The Guardsman has the lighter combat load right there.
How much lighter overall? Hard to say exactly. But I can off some thoughts you may wish to factor in.
In the modern day, materials are being made ever lighter. This includes clothing. What advances might’ve been made in the future, and what might the Imperium retain from man’s technological zenith.
How much do you reckon a Lasgun power pack weighs? So far as we can tell, it’s just a battery, and not necessarily a particularly fancy one, as it’s not containing gas, just bottle electrickery to power the weapon. Personally, I can’t see it weighing more than a modern 30 round clip.
Rations! As our understanding of nutrition and food preservation has grown, it seems army rations have become lighter and lighter. So again, what Future Advances have occurred and been maintained within the Imperium?
If you’re using drugs to counteract it, why not just use the same drugs to make already strong people stronger? The Imperium has no overall driver* to artificially skew things one way or the other.
Diminishing returns. There is a point in which simply having stronger soldiers no longer provides significant benefits. Moreover each additional increase of strength is usually harder to achieve.
Mind you I agree with the overall point that there are more male guardsmen than female (outside of outliers like Cadia or Catachan in which everyone is a soldier). But technology (drugs, genetic engineering, power armor, etc) is inherently an equalizer. Once upon a time being physically stronger had very direct benefits in warfare. Nowadays it still provides circumstancial benefits but a bullet is as deadly as ever regardless of the gender of the firer.
As technology advances gender becomes less and less relevant.
Why would the Guardsman carry less ammo than he can? No reason to have him carry less packs.
Edit: The body armor of the IG is also about 2 KG heavier than the US one, and roughly half a KG more than the Canadian Forces' one, though it includes forearm and lower leg protection. Only War does not have individual pieces for Guardsmen-issued kit so it's a bit hard to draw a comparision if the modern soldier had those pieces too, but I'd wager it would at best match it in term of weight for the US's kit, and go over for the CF's
Bobthehero wrote: Why are we imposing a limit on the IG in this scenario?
Because they have limits.
There might be billions of power packs on Forge World Batteri, but only ten thousand of them made it to the front lines thanks to logistics. Better ration your ammo.
Andykp wrote: And regardless of what real life bias you want to apply to the hobby the company that makes it clearly is going in a different direction. All guard releases, be they models, books or art contain a high proportion of female frontline soldiers.
What are we classing as a 'high proportion' here?
Because looking at the models range(s), for example:
2nd ed. Cadians - all dudes
3rd ed. Cadians - all dudes
new Cadians - ~30% (?) female if you max out on the heads
Tallarn - all dudes
Vostroyans - all dudes
Steel Legion - all dudes
Valhallans - all dudes
Mordians - all dudes
Praetorians - all dudes
Forge World Death Korps - all dudes
new Death Korps - all dudes
Elysians - all dudes
Catachans - 1 female (metal grenade launcher)
Other/Misc - 4 (?) female (Warrior Woman, Raine, recent BL Cadian officer, metal Tanith lasgun)
I'm not sure about the most recent Codex: Astra Militarum, but across all prior editions, you could probably count the number of female soldiers depicted in artwork on one hand (I can think of two...)
It seems to be more that the most recent batch of Cadians specifically has a relatively high proportion of females; but that's probably to be expected given the proportion of the population of the world under arms.
I wouldn't want to judge Steel Legion based on the models- they wear heavy enough gear it is hard to tell, and I'd apply the same to scions, although most combat-capable Schola females will go to Sisters or Commissars before scions. Same for DKoK, but I think canonically they are all male as designer war babies.
You missed Rocket Girl and the recent LE Catachan sergeant from the miscellaneous (was the old female commissar model official? I forget). Just nitpicking The thrust of your point is correct overall regarding a paucity of female models in the range, although it is higher in recent models.
IIRC, historically this has pretty consistently capped out at about 50kg for maximum sustainable human-carried load incl. clothes, armour, weapons, survival gear etc...
Pounds, not kg. Historically, soldiers have carried 36 kg or less. General rule of thumb is a soldier can carry about 1/3 to 1/2 of his bodyweight on an approach march and still be able to do something when he gets to the fight. Above that and you start breaking them down and reducing their ability to fight. It's not a new problem.
Ah! Thanks. Caught out by dastardly Imperial measurements...
Pyroalchi wrote:Out of curiosity as I have none of their models: could you tell if a Krieger was female? Gasmask + Greatcoat might cover up a lot...
See above.
Arschbombe wrote:
Wyldhunt wrote: .
Unless there's a thus far unmentioned massive gender gap in the eldar population.
I'm actually thinking about making a thread on that and how it might differ from say Biel-tan to Iybraesil.
Please do! The Aeldari deep dive threads are always interesting to see you, Wyldhunt, and Iracundus hash out.
Bobthehero wrote:Why would the Guardsman carry less ammo than he can? No reason to have him carry less packs.
Edit: The body armor of the IG is also about 2 KG heavier than the US one, and roughly half a KG more than the Canadian Forces' one, though it includes forearm and lower leg protection. Only War does not have individual pieces for Guardsmen-issued kit so it's a bit hard to draw a comparision if the modern soldier had those pieces too, but I'd wager it would at best match it in term of weight for the US's kit, and go over for the CF's
Yeah, lighter equipment typically means more stuff carried. Sure, some stuff might not be available, but you have an ideal load and then what is supplied today. Sometimes the guard will carry less due to supply issues, but they probably have an intention to carry as much as possible/loot it from corpses as available.
Worth noting that mass of gear is not equal. Leg and arm armour is more tiring and weighs more as it is moved more and is held further from the torso. Leg armour is much more fatiguing than the same mass of torso armour. One of the reasons soldiers throughout history do not typically favour leg armour before other areas, although somewhat doctrine dependent (hoplites would use greaves because their legs were exposed below the shields, for example).
For ammo i could totally see some adeptus beancounter doing the math.
Expected life span of soldier in combat vs. optimal firing rate compared to magazine capacity.
As mathematically the number of shots needed per guardsmen in combat probably is within a rounding error of “zero” they should be glad they are issued ammo in the first place!
Think of all the savings, both in expense and weight that the poor souls need to lug around if we just trimmed this statistically irrelevant bit of kit.
Andykp wrote: And regardless of what real life bias you want to apply to the hobby the company that makes it clearly is going in a different direction. All guard releases, be they models, books or art contain a high proportion of female frontline soldiers.
What are we classing as a 'high proportion' here?
Because looking at the models range(s), for example:
2nd ed. Cadians - all dudes
3rd ed. Cadians - all dudes
new Cadians - ~30% (?) female if you max out on the heads
Tallarn - all dudes
Vostroyans - all dudes
Steel Legion - all dudes
Valhallans - all dudes
Mordians - all dudes
Praetorians - all dudes
Forge World Death Korps - all dudes
new Death Korps - all dudes
Elysians - all dudes
Catachans - 1 female (metal grenade launcher)
Other/Misc - 4 (?) female (Warrior Woman, Raine, recent BL Cadian officer, metal Tanith lasgun)
I'm not sure about the most recent Codex: Astra Militarum, but across all prior editions, you could probably count the number of female soldiers depicted in artwork on one hand (I can think of two...)
It seems to be more that the most recent batch of Cadians specifically has a relatively high proportion of females; but that's probably to be expected given the proportion of the population of the world under arms.
Edit my post to include the new, my bad for being clear. I meant new releases.
I wouldn't want to judge Steel Legion based on the models- they wear heavy enough gear it is hard to tell, and I'd apply the same to scions, although most combat-capable Schola females will go to Sisters or Commissars before scions. Same for DKoK, but I think canonically they are all male as designer war babies.
It's Schrodinger's woman! Nobody has ever looked at the Steel Legion or Death Korps models and said to themselves 'they're likely to be women'.
Good catch on Rocket Girl and the Catachan nobody could get hold of.
I wouldn't want to judge Steel Legion based on the models- they wear heavy enough gear it is hard to tell, and I'd apply the same to scions, although most combat-capable Schola females will go to Sisters or Commissars before scions. Same for DKoK, but I think canonically they are all male as designer war babies.
It's Schrodinger's woman! Nobody has ever looked at the Steel Legion or Death Korps models and said to themselves 'they're likely to be women'.
Good catch on Rocket Girl and the Catachan nobody could get hold of.
Not disagreeing with that, merely pointing out that visible gender differences are gonna be minimal under all that clobber, so nothing stopping someone from saying half their Steel Legion are female based on the models. There are definitely female Steel Legion troopers in lore too (even in Armageddon stormtrooper companies).
The Catachan sergeant wasn't too hard to get, I managed to get two. The Catachan colonel however, that was a real unicorn
OP was asking why we rarely see female-majority IG regiments in the books.
I explained that the reason is because books are largely inspired by real life, and in real life female soldiers are a rarity because of physical differences between men and women. And for elite units - which IG is, or at least is *supposed to be* - women will be even rarer.
Most 40k books focus on Space Marines that are literally one in a trillion as far as demographics are concerned. So no, this whole debate of demographic ratios have nothing to do with narrative focus.
Moreover some of the regimes everyone loves to write about like Cadians and Catachans pretty much the tell biology to feth off by having planets and societies in which everyone is a soldier (and an 80s walking meme in the case of Catachan), which you know probably wouldn't work in real life but it never really stopped them.
This actually is a good point... at least for individual regiments.
But as I said: the reason why we rarely see female-majority IG regiments in the books is because they are rare in real life, and authors are inspired by real life. And there are very good reasons why they are rare in real life.
Sgt_Smudge wrote:And we're in the 40k Background subforum. You can leave reality at the door.
I cannot, because 40k WRITERS live in the reality. Therefore, they will be heavily influenced by it.
Plus, as I explained: assumption in fiction is that things are the same as in the Real Life unless explicitly noted as different. I actually don't think it makes sense why women in PDF are that rare - after all, PDF as something where "everybody on the planet should at least know how to use a lasgun" makes sense.
But for IG, from what we know of the setting, it actually does make sense to recruit best of the best.
The explanation is "the Imperium doesn't care". I don't know why you can't wrap your head around that.
Again, I go again to your suggestion that "books are largely inspired by real life" - lolwut?? How? Why? Where? What part of 40k has given you that impression??
I know Imperium doesn't care about spending human lives. I don't think Imperium doesn't care about combat effectiveness, however.
In fact, we KNOW it does care: hence why they go to such trouble to create Space Marines and recruit elite regiments.
And yes, books are largely inspired by real life. Even the setting itself is an overblown parody, but it is in fact easy to see where inspirations come from - and many are from real life. I will make a different thread for that, though.
So, explain soldiers like Larkin, Dorden, Domor or many of the Tanith. Explain the Salvar Chem-Dogs. Or the explicit mention of all-female and mixed sex regiments.
Uh, Salvar Chem Dogs are a) a penal legion that b) only came into existence due to the exact same circumstances as I had described as being a logical reason to waive any standards.
Tanith recruitment standards will be based on their own world - they will obviously be different from what standards would be on e.g. Catachan. In fact, having same standards for both would make no sense. Tanith are basically rangers, so their requirements will be based more towards endurance and stealth whereas Catachan obviously value physical strength due to the way they fight.
As for all-female and mixed sex regiments, I have already pointed out that they will exist. After all, it isn't that ALL women will be incapable of military service. Rather, so long as you apply equal standards, men will outnumber women by a significant amount.
But even then, the math dictates that there will be females, unless cultural reasons dictate them not to be.
I will illustrate what I am saying - and HAVE been saying all along - on an example...
Let's take a civilized world, population 10 billion.
Assume relatively normal First World recruitment levels for PDF - so 0,5% of the population.
This means that pass rate is 70% for men and 16% for women (so 23% of that of men). Meaning women will be 18,6% of the PDF, if we base it solely on the fitness test.
So we have 40 700 000 men and 9 300 000 women in PDF.
But only 10% make it to the Guard (if we take "tithe" as being literal). And assuming we have similar standards for the Imperial Guard as we do for the PDF, we now have another chokepoint.
If Guard fitness tests have similar recruitment outcome as with the original percentages, relative pass rate for men will be 49% compared to 2,56% for women.
This means that out of the 5 000 000 guardsmen, some 5% will be women - a ratio of 19 to 1. So you get 4 750 000 men and 250 000 women in the Guard batch in question.
Capisce?
"In reality" - yes, there's your problem. In reality, we don't have 12 foot tall greenskins, we don't warp powers, and we don't have Space Marines. So, drop it.
(oh, but your comment about 85% of the Imperium being starvation victims - have you SEEN the state of the Hive Cities? Not 85%, but it certainly ain't a small amount)
As I said: fiction is always assumed to be like reality except for the parts where it EXPLICITLY is not. So unless baseline humans in 40k are fundamentally different from modern-day humans (of which I have seen no evidence so far) or Imperium employs large-scale enhancement programme for IG recruits (of which I have also seen no evidence so far), I see no issue with applying real life standards.
I know what Hive Cities are like. But Hive Worlds, despite their massive population, are not exactly a standard in the Imperium.
And what advantages do those mean in the 41st millennium?
If this really is a debate, as you put it, explain to me why any real world logic is important in this discussion.
Ah, I'm sure the Catachans with their sleeveless flak vests are quaking about those concerns.
If these factors really were so meaningful, then explain the disparity between Tanith Guardsmen, Cadian Guardsmen, and Catachan Guardsmen, and how they're all rolled under the same banner.
Again, all I'm saying is that *GW doesn't recognise any distinction, and includes plenty of women in their regiments, both mono-sex and mixed.* For all your talk of the real world, neither GW or I care. If you can't discuss 40k without relying on IRL logic, and without acknowledging that 40k frequently abandons IRL logic, this discussion is not going to go anywhere.
I already have, multiple times - though perhaps not to you specifically.
But basically, there are two main reasons why real world logic matters here:
1) 40k writers live in the real world, and will be inspired by what they see in the real world. Therefore, they will often reflect the real world regardless of whether it makes sense in the setting or not.
2) Fiction is based on the real world. Therefore, inherent assumption in reading any kind of fiction (fantasy, sci-fi, whatever) is that things are the same as in the real world except where explicitly noted otherwise.
You don't assume that humans of the Warhammer Fantasy are inherently superhuman just because they live in a fantasy world? Or those of Star Wars or Homeworld, both of which are in literally different galaxies from our own?
Same thing here.
As for disparity between individual regiments, that is easy to explain by each world having its own tests - which, considering different fighting styles, only makes sense. Add cultural reasons on top of that, and you have a playground for "anything goes".
But law of averages still means that majority of the Imperial Guard overall will be men.
But as I said: the reason why we rarely see female-majority IG regiments in the books is because they are rare in real life, and authors are inspired by real life. And there are very good reasons why they are rare in real life.
Which doesn't mean that they can't be more equal 40,000 years in the future. After all, it wasn't all that long ago where women couldn't have professional careers, own property, or even vote, because they were considered physically or mentally more unfit than men.
I cannot, because 40k WRITERS live in the reality. Therefore, they will be heavily influenced by it.
Except science fiction writers typically write for...not reality? Think of writers in the 20's and 30's writing about female doctors or lawyers. Or hell, writing about things like satellites or computers or smart phones.
But for IG, from what we know of the setting, it actually does make sense to recruit best of the best.
Well, that depends on what one considers 'the best of the best.' The Tanith regiments, for example, are considered exemplary light skirmish troops not because of their physicality but because of their minor mutation that they never get lost. That doesn't seem gender locked.
Ogryns are unintelligent to the point where some of them can't even reload anything but the most basic of weapons. Ratlings are more slender thanks to their low-grav origins.
I think one could make the argument that the Astra Militarum is such a large organization that they can find a place for anyone, even all female regiments.
I know Imperium doesn't care about spending human lives. I don't think Imperium doesn't care about combat effectiveness, however.
In fact, we KNOW it does care: hence why they go to such trouble to create Space Marines and recruit elite regiments.
And yes, books are largely inspired by real life. Even the setting itself is an overblown parody, but it is in fact easy to see where inspirations come from - and many are from real life. I will make a different thread for that, though.
I'd make the argument that anything involving Space Marines is more driven by sales goal than anything approaching logic or 'real life comparisons.
Uh, Salvar Chem Dogs are a) a penal legion that b) only came into existence due to the exact same circumstances as I had described as being a logical reason to waive any standards.
Tanith recruitment standards will be based on their own world - they will obviously be different from what standards would be on e.g. Catachan. In fact, having same standards for both would make no sense. Tanith are basically rangers, so their requirements will be based more towards endurance and stealth whereas Catachan obviously value physical strength due to the way they fight.
As mentioned before, the uniqueness for Tanith is their mutation which was far as I know, isn't gender specific. Though given the state of Tanith, it's unlikely we'll find out.
Catachan's uniqueness is that their origin is an infamous death world, which last I checked isn't populated solely by men. It's entirely possible that women from Catachan are just as deadly as their male counterparts, or close enough that it doesn't matter.
As for all-female and mixed sex regiments, I have already pointed out that they will exist. After all, it isn't that ALL women will be incapable of military service. Rather, so long as you apply equal standards, men will outnumber women by a significant amount.
But even then, the math dictates that there will be females, unless cultural reasons dictate them not to be.
I will illustrate what I am saying - and HAVE been saying all along - on an example...
Let's take a civilized world, population 10 billion.
Assume relatively normal First World recruitment levels for PDF - so 0,5% of the population.
This means that pass rate is 70% for men and 16% for women (so 23% of that of men). Meaning women will be 18,6% of the PDF, if we base it solely on the fitness test.
So we have 40 700 000 men and 9 300 000 women in PDF.
But only 10% make it to the Guard (if we take "tithe" as being literal). And assuming we have similar standards for the Imperial Guard as we do for the PDF, we now have another chokepoint.
If Guard fitness tests have similar recruitment outcome as with the original percentages, relative pass rate for men will be 49% compared to 2,56% for women.
This means that out of the 5 000 000 guardsmen, some 5% will be women - a ratio of 19 to 1. So you get 4 750 000 men and 250 000 women in the Guard batch in question.
Capisce?
The problem with this is that you're using the argument for standard humans on their home planet that's not in a state of total war.
Let me just throw a few wrenches into your arguments.
High grav worlds would naturally produce sturdier individuals. Yes, even women. An average woman who grew up in a 1.3g world could outlift and outperform all but the most dedicated males on Earth. Take it to a large enough extreme and you have ogryns that, while strong, would in no way pass even the most basic of exams--since even putting down their name is an issue for most of them.
Low grave worlds. Take the above and inverse it. Women on earth would most likely be far stronger than a male that grew up on a .7g world. Take it to extremes and you get ratlings--who *are* in the Guard and don't get a pass because of their diminutive nature.
Even on Earth, people who have grown up in high altitude locations tend to perform better physically than those not, which is why Kenya produces such excellent runners. People who have spent generations diving are able to hold their breath better, etc.
Then there's the bionic enhancements, chemical cocktails, and otherwise advanced medical technology available within the Imperium.
There's also the fact that on Necromunda, arguably one of the most dangerous and deadly hives in the Imperium, women are not only not considered inferior, there's a very successful House located there that's primarily made up of women.
As I said: fiction is always assumed to be like reality except for the parts where it EXPLICITLY is not. So unless baseline humans in 40k are fundamentally different from modern-day humans (of which I have seen no evidence so far) or Imperium employs large-scale enhancement programme for IG recruits (of which I have also seen no evidence so far), I see no issue with applying real life standards.
I know what Hive Cities are like. But Hive Worlds, despite their massive population, are not exactly a standard in the Imperium.
Except your arguments are based on our current reality but not the logical expansion of the 40k universe, in which there is genetic modification and mutations (unless you think no one ever bothered outside of the Space Marines, or that Tanith's mutation was purely unique). You've ignored the influence of gravity, of growing up in different environments, and the effect of the Imperium's effectively on-going total war stance, and the fact that they've just too big and bureaucratic to make any efficiency changes.
I already have, multiple times - though perhaps not to you specifically.
But basically, there are two main reasons why real world logic matters here:
1) 40k writers live in the real world, and will be inspired by what they see in the real world. Therefore, they will often reflect the real world regardless of whether it makes sense in the setting or not.
If scifi writers are writing purely based off the real world, with current world sensibilities, in a setting that's pretty explicitly space fantasy 40,000 years into the future, they're arguably not worth the paper they're writing on. Imagine Star Trek treating Uhura as an anomaly on that show because it was written with the sensibilities of the 70's as the primary focus. Whereas today, most of us wouldn't even bat an eye at a woman or non-white person being an officer.
2) Fiction is based on the real world. Therefore, inherent assumption in reading any kind of fiction (fantasy, sci-fi, whatever) is that things are the same as in the real world except where explicitly noted otherwise.
The only time where this applies if it's fiction written in contemporary or within specific timeframes (like Stargate). And even then, those fictions are usually written or are going to poke at the backwards mentality of those timeframes.
You don't assume that humans of the Warhammer Fantasy are inherently superhuman just because they live in a fantasy world? Or those of Star Wars or Homeworld, both of which are in literally different galaxies from our own?
Except...they sometimes are? Humans in the Empire, much less the chaos wastes, *can* be superhuman, whether through raw physical prowess or being able to make reality their bitch with their brains. Star Wars, you can actually have random people turn into super human space wizards, or even those that aren't can be 'force sensitive' and end up inherently better than the people around them.
For Homeworld, they could very well be super human but the only thing that would matter in that universe is if they could survive in 2000C environments. Which we have empirical evidence that they cannot.
As for disparity between individual regiments, that is easy to explain by each world having its own tests - which, considering different fighting styles, only makes sense. Add cultural reasons on top of that, and you have a playground for "anything goes".
It's more likely the Imperium provides the criteria that the planetary government must meet. "You are hereby called upon to provide a regiment of 3,000 men/women, between the ages of X and Y, with no chronic conditions that were result in impaired service within 20 years" etc. etc.
I already have, multiple times - though perhaps not to you specifically.
But basically, there are two main reasons why real world logic matters here:
1) 40k writers live in the real world, and will be inspired by what they see in the real world. Therefore, they will often reflect the real world regardless of whether it makes sense in the setting or not.
If scifi writers are writing purely based off the real world, with current world sensibilities, in a setting that's pretty explicitly space fantasy 40,000 years into the future, they're arguably not worth the paper they're writing on. Imagine Star Trek treating Uhura as an anomaly on that show because it was written with the sensibilities of the 70's as the primary focus. Whereas today, most of us wouldn't even bat an eye at a woman or non-white person being an officer.
What's also interesting is how some generations today watch the Original Star Trek and they don't actually see any of the progressive, risky elements that they did for what they were. Kirk kissing Uhura in one scene is basically nothing to be remarked on today, yet its one of, if not the first cases of a white and dark skinned person kissing on TV in the world. For its time that was huge, as was having a multi-cultural cast with key roles.
Also even if you are inspired by modern times, which country or even region is being looked at in the modern world? There are cultures today where women are not permitted to step outside without covering up their entire body; and there are cultures where women can walk freely in a bikini. Both are around today, both are modern times. Just like there are armed forces where women are allowed to join and those where they are not. It should also be noted that women serving, whilst not a new thing, is still something which has been expanded with limits and restrictions being lifted even well into this millennium. So its still an active area of growth and change rather than one that's set in stone.
I disagree with the idea that 40k writers are writing based on the real world. But I could see the argument that they are writing based on popular conceptions of historical warfare.
I mean, the IG is mostly thematically designed as a meme of a WW1 military but with nicer weapons: they have weirdly tall rhomboid tanks with sponsons, make heavy use of wave tactics and trenches and mostly static heavy weapon teams and artillery.
It has nothing to do with real life militaries (arguably that is the Tau) but with popular concepts of how the WW1 was fought (not even actually real historical ones).
Just saying 'source please' isn't in itself an argument...
Would you prefer I make a long rambling schizo post without a single relevant source for my assertion?
A poster who makes a claim like "Women don't make up more than 5% of the Astra Militarum" without a single in-universe citation to lend credence to that claim is not a poster worth considering for anything more than a cheap laugh.
Just saying 'source please' isn't in itself an argument...
Would you prefer I make a long rambling schizo post without a single relevant source for my assertion?
A poster who makes a claim like "Women don't make up more than 5% of the Astra Militarum" without a single in-universe citation to lend credence to that claim is not a poster worth considering for anything more than a cheap laugh.
He can believe what he wants and you can believe what you want. Since there’s nothing in lore that gives us statistics or numbers you both can be right. The game is for everyone. We should just lock this thread. A lot of name calling is coming from this, this thread is gone.
The planet that rebels in Shadowsword explicitely does so because the tithes takes away too many (male) men, the Governess repeats so over and over, and uses the terms husbands and fathers to clarify it means male humans.
The idea to use women (and children) only entered in the context of using them as workforce for the planet while the male workers would get tithed to the Guard.
Just saying 'source please' isn't in itself an argument...
Would you prefer I make a long rambling schizo post without a single relevant source for my assertion?
A poster who makes a claim like "Women don't make up more than 5% of the Astra Militarum" without a single in-universe citation to lend credence to that claim is not a poster worth considering for anything more than a cheap laugh.
He isn't saying that though. He is saying that if we are to use real world numbers and apply them to the Imperial Guard you would expect to see about 5% be women. That isn't the same as saying that the Guard won't be more than 5% women but that if the lore doesn't give us much more details that show how the differences between men and women in the Imperium are vastly smaller than in our own world we should expect there to be more men than women in the guard. The exact ratio we can't figure out and it could be vastly different depending on the world they are recruited from but it does give us a good baseline to start a discussion from if we assume the Imperium has more equality between the sexes and they don't put physical fitness as a higher priority than modern earth do. 5% as a minimum and 49% as a maximum and the truth somewhere in between.
Bobthehero wrote: The planet that rebels in Shadowsword explicitely does so because the tithes takes away too many (male) men, the Governess repeats so over and over, and uses the terms husbands and fathers to clarify it means male humans.
The idea to use women (and children) only entered in the context of using them as workforce for the planet while the male workers would get tithed to the Guard.
That’s one specific world, each world will have its own cultures and rules to abide by. It’s not reflection of the greater imperium. That world also celebrated gluttony if I remember correctly and the ruling class were so fat they had to anti grav stuff to move about?? Might have dreamt that though.
I already have, multiple times - though perhaps not to you specifically.
But basically, there are two main reasons why real world logic matters here:
1) 40k writers live in the real world, and will be inspired by what they see in the real world. Therefore, they will often reflect the real world regardless of whether it makes sense in the setting or not.
If scifi writers are writing purely based off the real world, with current world sensibilities, in a setting that's pretty explicitly space fantasy 40,000 years into the future, they're arguably not worth the paper they're writing on. Imagine Star Trek treating Uhura as an anomaly on that show because it was written with the sensibilities of the 70's as the primary focus. Whereas today, most of us wouldn't even bat an eye at a woman or non-white person being an officer.
What's also interesting is how some generations today watch the Original Star Trek and they don't actually see any of the progressive, risky elements that they did for what they were. Kirk kissing Uhura in one scene is basically nothing to be remarked on today, yet its one of, if not the first cases of a white and dark skinned person kissing on TV in the world. For its time that was huge, as was having a multi-cultural cast with key roles.
Also even if you are inspired by modern times, which country or even region is being looked at in the modern world? There are cultures today where women are not permitted to step outside without covering up their entire body; and there are cultures where women can walk freely in a bikini. Both are around today, both are modern times. Just like there are armed forces where women are allowed to join and those where they are not. It should also be noted that women serving, whilst not a new thing, is still something which has been expanded with limits and restrictions being lifted even well into this millennium. So its still an active area of growth and change rather than one that's set in stone.
Exactly! Remember a time when women couldn’t join he military in he west, or not so combat roles? If you base stuff “real world” what they really mean if their interpretation of the real world, their experience of it. A certain view of the real world would have zero women in the guard if women in that culture can’t vote, drive or fight.
And this is the problem of using science to explain their misogyny. Men are tougher, men pass the fitness test more often etc. it wasn’t that long again that it was thought by science that women shouldn’t be educated because their brains couldn’t handle it, that vehicles couldn’t go over 20 miles per hour because women would pass out and die they were so delicate. “Science” isn’t without bias, certainly not the sources quoted in this thread.
This is a fantasy setting that is supposed to push the boundaries of what is and isn’t possible or acceptable. We don’t have a number for women in the guard so head canon what you like but dint sorry someone else’s is wrong because “science”. For me, plenty women in the guard, so many that it isn’t an issue to see one, like in the fluff. There are planets where it’s men only and regiments where it’s women only (and probably planets). Hell, I even have female marines in my home brew chapter (the horror!).
A little tangential, but you'd think woman would be just fine in a tank regiment. Hauling shells and wrestling with machinery takes some extra brawn, but that's all that comes to mind. They might even fit inside those Leman Russ's better .
He isn't saying that though. He is saying that if we are to use real world numbers and apply them to the Imperial Guard you would expect to see about 5% be women. That isn't the same as saying that the Guard won't be more than 5% women but that if the lore doesn't give us much more details that show how the differences between men and women in the Imperium are vastly smaller than in our own world we should expect there to be more men than women in the guard. The exact ratio we can't figure out and it could be vastly different depending on the world they are recruited from but it does give us a good baseline to start a discussion from if we assume the Imperium has more equality between the sexes and they don't put physical fitness as a higher priority than modern earth do. 5% as a minimum and 49% as a maximum and the truth somewhere in between.
I didn't care about his rambling post without a single canonical source. What makes you think I'd care about yours?
He isn't saying that though. He is saying that if we are to use real world numbers and apply them to the Imperial Guard you would expect to see about 5% be women. That isn't the same as saying that the Guard won't be more than 5% women but that if the lore doesn't give us much more details that show how the differences between men and women in the Imperium are vastly smaller than in our own world we should expect there to be more men than women in the guard. The exact ratio we can't figure out and it could be vastly different depending on the world they are recruited from but it does give us a good baseline to start a discussion from if we assume the Imperium has more equality between the sexes and they don't put physical fitness as a higher priority than modern earth do. 5% as a minimum and 49% as a maximum and the truth somewhere in between.
I didn't care about his rambling post without a single canonical source. What makes you think I'd care about yours?
Sticking your finger in your ears and saying "la la la la if its not in the sacred GW texts its not real" doesn't lend any credence to your argument. Using data and historical norms from the real world is far more valid than whatever you think you are accomplishing and anyone with a brain is going to dismiss you entirely.
One group that thinks men are most likely a clear majority due to the same reasons we have mostly men in modern armies but that the exact ratios may very well be closer to 50% than the low % we have currently. There are after all a lot of differences between 40k and the Imperium and 2023 Earth. Most seem to be very open to some worlds being majority or even only female regiments though they think overall men would be most common. It is just an interesting discussion trying to find out where in the 1%-49% range the amount of women would be. It is more about facts and world building than any ideology or values.
Then there is a group that want it to be an almost 50/50 split due to ideology and uses arguments only for their side (when often the same enhancements/improvements/changes could as well work in the other direction) and think anyone who argues against them are sexists that don't want women at all in the Imperial Guard.
I belong in the first group and I assume most others in that group are as open to the idea that we are actually quite wrong in our assumptions as soon as more background info is released and we can get a better backing on how the distribution really is. Anything can be justified and explained with the right world building. We just don't have any at the moment that should give us an expectation that it is close to a 50/50 split.
The second group I feel would be more against lore that made the guard a 1/10 or 1/5 ratio of women to men than the first group would be against lore that made women 30-50% of the guard since they aren't after a world that is coherent in its world building but after a world that reflects how they think it should be. If it doesn't fit their view of the world then they want to impose their will on it to change it.
I would be fine even with a majority women in the guard if they made up a good enough reason for it that I would think fit into the setting. It doesn't have to behave to our modern values and logic since there is a lot of rot and decay in the Imperium. So the reason just have to make some twisted since in the 40k universe and I would be fine with it. But there needs to be a reason.
I perhaps wasn't really clear in what I meant. Not really using ideology as political world view that aligns to certain party politics but as how they wish the world should be. Nothing wrong with that but it is a different angle seeing or attacking this subject compared to those that come from what we know of militaries in real world and what we know or not know about the 40k setting and try to argue this subject from that direction.
I think quite a few of those that are coming from this more "ideological" or "preferable" way of thinking are assuming bad intentions from those that don't. It is quite easy to understand why this misconception happens though. If they argue from what they believe is how it should be and then also assumes that their opponents in this discussion are also arguing from the same angle then it is easy to assume bad intentions. A lot of the proponents for a closer to a 50/50 split is obviously arguing from a position that it should be so and that it is a better outcome if it is more equal. It is a "good" moral argument. So if you are against it then you must be a "bad" person.
But the people arguing against an equal split being likely aren't doing it for moral reasons but from what they see is facts. It being good or bad or morals in general have nothing at all to do with it.
Which is why after 10 pages there still is 2 largely split camps since they are arguing past each other due to not having a common understanding on what basis they are arguing on.
TLR Some is arguing from how it seems to be and some from how they think it should be and some people thus have a hard time arguing in good faith because they think everyone is arguing the same way they are.
Again anything in our head canon goes (for the most part). The universe was made to be like that. If you want to believe it’s a 50-50 split ok cool it’s canon. If you want to believe it’s vastly majority men, ok cool it’s canon. It’s your hobby, it’s made for everyone.
It’s really disappointing how aggressive and rude some people are being in this thread.
Klickor wrote: I perhaps wasn't really clear in what I meant. Not really using ideology as political world view that aligns to certain party politics but as how they wish the world should be. Nothing wrong with that but it is a different angle seeing or attacking this subject compared to those that come from what we know of militaries in real world and what we know or not know about the 40k setting and try to argue this subject from that direction.
I think quite a few of those that are coming from this more "ideological" or "preferable" way of thinking are assuming bad intentions from those that don't. It is quite easy to understand why this misconception happens though. If they argue from what they believe is how it should be and then also assumes that their opponents in this discussion are also arguing from the same angle then it is easy to assume bad intentions. A lot of the proponents for a closer to a 50/50 split is obviously arguing from a position that it should be so and that it is a better outcome if it is more equal. It is a "good" moral argument. So if you are against it then you must be a "bad" person.
But the people arguing against an equal split being likely aren't doing it for moral reasons but from what they see is facts. It being good or bad or morals in general have nothing at all to do with it.
Which is why after 10 pages there still is 2 largely split camps since they are arguing past each other due to not having a common understanding on what basis they are arguing on.
TLR Some is arguing from how it seems to be and some from how they think it should be and some people thus have a hard time arguing in good faith because they think everyone is arguing the same way they are.
Ah, my apologies then, I misread your post.
I do disagree with assuming stuff that hasn't been filled in works like what we're used to now. Applying current day expectations* to a setting 38k years in the future, and applying real world logic to a magical fantasy setting (in space), these things don't make sense to me. I think a more reasonable approach would be to base assumptions only on in-universe sources and logic, and "we don't know, hopefully they'll fill this in someday" would be an acceptable answer for unknown stuff. Sure we can theorize, but we can't be sure.
So I'm arguing against assuming a female minority in the guard from what I see as logic and facts, and I am indeed having a hard time understanding the other side :p no "this is how it should be" or whatever here.
*many of these expectations are based on current cultural developments that are still in motion, such as doctors or soldiers being men-only. It's changed drastically in the past decades, and I think it'll look different than today a few decades from now. Which makes it really weird to me to apply a snapshot of an unfinished process as some sort of representative end-state for a future so far away that it boggles the mind. I think this is also the true cause of the split between our two camps.
And yes, this topic overlaps with some current ideological discussions, making it easy to assign the opposing camp to the matching ideology. This applies equally to both camps here I'd say.
The thrust of your point is correct overall regarding a paucity of female models in the range, although it is higher in recent models.
