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The ratio in the current miniature box, if you only use a single box and don't glob multiple boxes together, has 1/3 of the heads being female.
I have the Cadia box, and enough female heads are included to make everyone female, if one were so inclined.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Which is an argument I myself made, informed by Cain’s rather disdainful opinion of Stormtroopers. He describes them as the meatheads of the Schola Progenium, the headbangers not terribly well suited elsewhere.
Was this the ice planet book? I think those guys he went down into the caves were drop-outs from the Inquisitorial Stormtrooper training, and the equivalent of kasrkins. From what I recall, the Schola Progenium mostly trained what the Imperium expected to be special forces, officers, etc. Though now thinking on it, not everyone would fit that bill since they apparently take anyone who had at least one parent who died in military service to the Imperium.
But still, the gender mix of the Schola Progenium probably has no relevance to the Astra Militarum's recruitment.
No, nobody has said that. Being recruited at a 30% ratio to men would still qualify as being recruited en-masse. And the reason it would be lower compared to men would be because of many women choosing of their own free will to not join, as happens IRL and we must assume will continue to happen in 40k because there is NO EVIDENCE THIS HAS/WILL HAVE CHANGED. Wishful thinking on your part aside.
What's funny is that you have no evidence, and GW has certainly not commented, to suggest that only 30% of the Astra Militarum is made up as women. The only comment that's been made is that the regiments are usually filled with one gender and that mixed units do exist but are atypical. And some people use their modern assumptions, to put it nicely, to say, still, "Well, that obviously means that there's still more boys in that there treehouse!"
And recruitment into the military has a lot of factors. In the US, recruitment percentages are way, way down compared to WW2, and they're not even as prejudiced to non-white males as they used to be. Military recruitment in the US is also one of the only ways to guarantee a social safety net in the form of free education, healthcare, and a stipend should you be returned to the civilian world damaged. And still, recruitment is down. A lot of that has to do with better economic opportunities or alternatives available, the reduced amount of propaganda the armed forces puts out, and the general popular opinion that you might not want to die in a desert generation war so rich a-holes can get richer.
And if you want further evidence of why women may shy away from military recruitment, there's also the whole thing that you're all but guaranteed to be sexually harrassed, assaulted, or outright raped, and there's a good chance your assaulters will never be punished for it. Would you want to join a profession where that was a likely outcome? Yeah, me either. And that's just by your own fellows--it's likely significantly worse if captured by the enemy.
But hey, if the Imperium started pumping out propaganda, and actually showed women in said propaganda, who's to say they wouldn't join in the same levels as their male counterparts? So there's evidence to your change.
Because having equal standards for everybody means that Imperial Guard would have to come up with standards, test ALL potential recruits for these standards, select the best recruits from those tested... and do it all on its own. Doing that would be just insane. Especially since we see that different worlds have different fighting styles and cultures, and those then translate into the way Imperial Guard regiments fight. And the existence of different fighting styles and world-based specializations means two things. First, applying same standards for a Tanith scout and a Catachan Jungle Fighter would be flat-out insane. Second, it is the proof positive that the sort of standardization I had described previously does not actually exist in the Imperial Guard.
Except the Astra Militarum doesn't recruit individual recruits. A tithe is placed on a world, or the world of its own accord, and a regiment is drawn up. Tanith implies that the world even supplies the regiments with their gear (and Cadia's ubiquitous equipment implies that it can also be purchased if not locally manufactured). So yes, it does make sense for the Astra Militarum to have minimum requirements so worlds aren't just tossing out ten thousand senior citizens to fight orks off on a world they couldn't care less about.
And applying the same standard to a Tanith scout and Catachan fighter to, at a minimum, be able to hold, aim, and fire a lasgun makes fine. After all, I'm assuming your country's military would require their infantry to, at a minimum, be able to stand, walk, and run, regardless of age, gender, or ethnicity.
And the AM's minimum standards do not seem to care what bits one has or doesn't have between their legs.
I do not misunderstand. Just this fact:
"Imperium can't physically move enough troops at a time"
means that Imperial Guard cannot afford to NOT be selective about who they are letting in. And in the fluff, we repeatedly see that Imperial Guard is in fact elite formation compared to the Planetary Defense Forces.
But that's exactly what they do, regardless of if they can afford it or not. That's the Imperium's thing. They can't stop to improve their military so they just throw more bodies at the problem because yes, it's so inefficient and pointlessly cruel, but they can't stop. Because they're in a state of total war. And if they stop, humanity gets some combination of eaten, annihilated, or enslaved.
Uh, Custodians are basically super-Marines. Except their genetic modification is noted as being far more difficult and impossible to apply at large scale, with each Custodian being a hand-crafted piece of artwork, genetically. And if you need to get in good with a Warmaster to be given gene treatment, that is hardly proof of said treatment being widely available.
They're leftover thunderwarriors from the Emp's reunification of Earth. If they had the ability to create "super marine perfect works of art" in an irradiated hellhole like that, what makes you think easier ways to genetically modify wouldn't be more available? I'm sure even Picasso started with stick figures at some point.
Hell, rejuvenation treatments are genetic modification, and they're ubiquitous among...well, anyone with any amount of influence in the Imperium. Even Colonel's seem to have access to them, much less the nobility, affluent individuals, Inquisitors, and so on.
And it wasn't the fact that the guy got in good with the Warmaster that gave him the genetic treatments. It was him getting out from under the thumb of the noble he was with (a noble Horus wanted to thumb anyway), and it was the ease he was given those treatments. There was no, oh, he's not compatible, or oh, there were complications, or oh, he was turned into a slavering monster. He got it, with seemingly no impact to his health or cognitive functions. It was easy.
Because we see in the lore that Imperial Guard regiments are not, in fact, standardized. Rather, their way of fighting and equipment depends heavily on the culture and characteristics of the world they hail from.
If they truly were "comparing" people from different worlds - that is, having standardized recruitment standards - then we would likely see evidence of this in large amount of overall standardization of the Imperial Guard itself. But we see no such evidence, other than the fact that some 90% of the regiments copy aesthetics (and only aesthetics) of Cadian regiments.
Also, just because bureaucracy screws up doesn't mean IG doesn't try to use regiments in environments suitable for them.
You seem stuck in this one rut that you can't wrap your mind around the fact that a soldier in the Astra Militarum, regardless of their specialty, is still supposed to be a soldier and able to pick up a basic lasgun and fight who they're told to fight.
You know how like the saying that in the US Marines, everyone is an infantrymen? That means everyone in the Marines, from the rawest private to the medic to the guy flying the Osprey to the Commandant himself has been trained and is expected to be able to pick up a rifle and be combat effective. They're not expected to be special forces, but they are expected to fight and kill if necessary.
But to your point, that's also part of the recruitment tithe. The world doesn't seem to get a say in the regiment that's raised, unless they raise it themselves. Tanith was tasked to raise three regiments of light skirmish infantry. Presumably more industrial worlds would recruit standard regiments or even armored companies, etc.
And yes, Guard are expected to fight where they're told to fight. In one of the books, the Tanith--who are light infantry skirmishers--are put in WW2 style trench warfare where they're expected to suffer heavy casualties by doing stupid (even by AM standards) trench assaults and defenses.
I was talking about frontline combatants the entire time. Hardly a need for disclaimer.
No, you said: "men make better soldiers than women for purely biological reasons." I clarified your statement since there's more to being a soldier than upper body strength.
Imperium of Man is basically Roman-Empire-turned-Holy-Roman-Empire-IN-SPEHSS!
Lasgun is literally an assault rifle in terms of functionality.
Most Imperial Guard regiments are direct copies of various historical units.
And even ignoring that... imagination needs material to work with. Raw data comes in, results come out.
For the sake of argument, sure, let's say they're all those things...until they're not. You're talking about a setting where you can have WW1 aesthetic humans fight space demons.
And the thing that just breaks your suspension of disbelief is the fact that women fight in equal numbers to men? And when told, by the creators themselves, that women fighting in the Guard is not anamous, has to cobble together out of context real world examples that don't apply or may not apply, as a reason to say, well, yeah, they fight, but not as much or as hard as the boys because men are just so much better at dying in a trench than girls.
Maybe. But considering how most other showings don't imply anything of the sort...
Because most talented people in the AM probably end up dead in a warzone. Because it doesn't matter if you can lift an extra 20 lbs. if a bolter liquefies you, acid melts you, a gauss rifle turns you into dust, or some projectile tears its way through your insides.
Because we've plateaued. The end state for those things has been achieved, and the rate of change will rapidly diminish to an equilibrium in the next few decades.
And since mankind has not moved past the biological reality we have today, to assume that men and women have changed dramatically enough to have their basic behaviors altered away from what we see today is egregious speculation.
I assume that what exists today is the median. A baseline around which individual human cultures will orbit, fluctuating in one way or the other but always returning to the baseline over thousands of years because culture isn't a continuous change forward, its more of a pendulum.
Are you high? We've plateaued? Buddy, we don't even have a homogenized culture among our species right now. To say cultured has plateaued with regards to...well, any aspect or culture is not only absurd, it's outright laughable to the point of satire.
Even in the US, in a relatively geo politically, extremely wealthy nation that doesn't need to worry about an outside enemy, its culture has become vastly different in just the last 100 years. In the past 100 years, the US has: become a world power, become a super power, had an industrial revolution, turned post industrial revolution, had women's suffrage, enshrined civil rights for minorities (who were [and arguably still are, but let's not get into that] treated as second class citizens), legalized--as in, allowed to exist without criminal punishment--homosexuals, given said people equal rights to heterosexuals, had several economic collapses, etc. The culture in one relatively stable nation across one century has change drastically. To say that it won't change any further is just silly.
Now take all that, add 38,000 years to it, and all the crap that's happened and continues to happen in 40k, and sure, what we have today is a median. Whatever you say, pal.
This is not a cultural reason, but a simple fact of biology, economics, and logic. The so-called culture is nothing but a by-product of them.
under natural circumstances, only women can give birth to children, and it takes at least ten years for a child to become a combat and labor force. During this time, someone must take care of them---How can a human group that encourages women to join the military and compensate for the rapid loss of women population? They would have few and even no any descendants, and their enemies would benefit from more female captives. Such a human group would have no future.
this is the basic design of the human species as a mammal, winnowed out by natural selection over milion of years, and it determines our mindset and ideological tendencies. Of course there are alway some few exceptions - but they are just some rare individual,always a minority---------maybe in the distant future, some human worlds will be able to mass-produce female soldiers with giant artificial wombs, but even so, women will always be physically less suitable for combat than men, barring some radical genetic modification.
But these factors no longer exist in 40k, so why do you insist that they still do?
Women aren't the only forms of birth in the Imperium anymore. There's cloning. There's vats. There's tubing. So even if women were to rapidly die off--like, say, on Krieg--that doesn't mean the end of the population.
As for taking care of the young without their mothers, have you heard of orphanages? Foster care? Grandparents? Hell, this is the Imperium, so we can throw the Imperial Cult, "schools", creches, and the like into the mix.
And even without that, it's stated as fact that the only resource the Imperium has in abundance is bodies. They don't care if they send women or men to die for the Imperium. The only point where it even might be a concern is for newly seeded worlds, but even then, those worlds seem mostly exempt from that part of the tithe, if Tanith is any concern. They were to raise 30k troops from a population in the multi-millions.
And the fact that the Sisters of Battle exist sort of invalidates your whole point. Humanity hasn't died off because half a billion women decide to join up and fight and not stay at home and pump out babies.
All the radical changes of the 40K era are just emerging and tiny part in the entire history of human evolution. The entire evolutionary history of humans (not just Homo sapiens) has exceeded 3 million years, and the drastic changes of just a few tens of thousands of years are nothing - the basic logic and mindset of our system has been solidified in our hardware, and it must be changed through far more radical changes (even more than Oygrns)to change this inherent programming and old design.
Even though humans are already active in space, they are still just a group of hairless apes living in savanah in their hardware design. A more radical change means becoming something that no longer conforms to the current imperium’s legal definition.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2024/01/06 11:37:41
Maybe you should explain why you are uncomfortable with 30/70?
I'm not uncomfy with that, at face value. I'm uncomfy with your reasoning behind it, because it's pants-on-head lunacy.
This. If we actually had some evidence supporting a specific assertion of a 30/70 split, I'd shrug and say, "Guess that's the setting." Waaaay back in this thread I think I asserted a bare minimum of 20% to explain why women in the guard never seem to get remarked upon. My issue isn't that a 30/70 split could be the case. My issue is that you're asserting a pretty major gender gap, and the reasoning you're using to do so doesn't really hold up under scrutiny.
As Smudge and others have pointed out, there are still huge cultural pressures, even in countries where it's legal for women to serve, that are very likely responsible for the gender gap in military service in those countries. So it seems really weird for you to keep insisting that no one can possibly know why more men than women might serve. Like, you *are* aware that in America, at least, there's still a lot of stuff discouraging girls/women from engaging in traditionally masculine activities and professions, right? Can we at least agree on that much?
And I see no reason those cultural pressures wouldn't remain, even if all legal barriers have faded from memory and imagination, simply because humans are still humans.
My reasoning seems to hold up just fine since the only counter arguments are personal attacks and hand wringing. And since you yourself say that 20% would be minimum for women to be seen as unremarkable I don't see why you have an issue with my reasoning. A 20% gap doesn't seem like an unreasonably large gap to me, so IDK why everyone is losing their mind over it.
I just don't see how any reasonable person could see someone using the real world as an extrapolation point to be "Pants on head lunacy". If the real world can't be used as a metric at all, then we can't make any guesses whatsoever.. Why are we even still here if that is the case? Just leave if that is your opinion, just leave the entire background section if that is your opinion since any discussion regarding the background would be kinda pointless with that standard.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2024/01/06 05:55:09
Self-proclaimed evil Cat-person. Dues Ex Felines
Cato Sicarius, after force feeding Captain Ventris a copy of the Codex Astartes for having the audacity to play Deathwatch, chokes to death on his own D-baggery after finding Calgar assembling his new Eldar army.
I assume that what exists today is the median. A baseline around which individual human cultures will orbit, fluctuating in one way or the other but always returning to the baseline over thousands of years because culture isn't a continuous change forward, its more of a pendulum.
This is so obviously and blatantly ahistorical and absurd premise. After 200 000 years of human history, now at this moment you happen to be alive, the humanity has been perfected, achieved its eternal natural state. Throughout history humans often though something like this, they were always wrong. What you posted is essentially an admission that you have no clue, so there is no point in discussing this with you.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2024/01/06 11:18:00
I assume that what exists today is the median. A baseline around which individual human cultures will orbit, fluctuating in one way or the other but always returning to the baseline over thousands of years because culture isn't a continuous change forward, its more of a pendulum.
This is so obviously and blatantly ahistorical and absurd premise. After 200 000 years of human history, now at this moment you happen to be alive, the humanity has been perfected, achieved it's eternal natural state. Throughout history humans often though something like this, they were always wrong. What you posted is essentially an admission that you have no clue, so there is no point in discussing this with you.
I bet you there were many Romans who considered their society the height of what humanity could achieve, even whilst they had slavery and the Gladiator Games and such; plus Rome was around for what 500years give or take as a major power before it started falling aprt? Of course we still have things like boxing and ruby where you can get very serious short, long term and fatal health impacts. I could wager societies in the future might look back at the "soft bloodsports" and think them horrific that people would bet, gamble, pay vast sums and keep such a "Sport" alive.
Also for those considering social pressures; girls still get Barby and boys still get Action Man. The marketing behind many kids toys is exceptionally gender polarized, even today where some of those polarizations have weakened. A lot of things like that can mentally establish boundaries and ideas in kids minds that will shape their development and might be thoughts and impressions that they either never shed or which take ages to do so. Consider all the men who have considered "house work" as "womens work". Which is plainly not true for any man who has lived alone and had to make their own bed; wash their own laundry; do their own dishes and hoover their own carpets.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2024/01/06 10:55:07
WWW-STL wrote:This is not a cultural reason, but a simple fact of biology, economics, and logic. The so-called culture is nothing but a by-product of them.
Or, in other words, show me you don't understand sociology without *telling* me you don't understand sociology. /s
"Logic" has been proven to be faulty and flawed countless times throughout history. Once, it was considered "logical" that women should be able to vote, because of their temperament. Once, it was considered just logical and economically sound to own slaves.
under natural circumstances, only women can give birth to children, and it takes at least ten years for a child to become a combat and labor force.
The Imperium doesn't always use natural forms of reproduction.
During this time, someone must take care of them
Orphanages? Extended families? Scholas? Hell, even a matriarchal society could dictate that the men are to raise the children.
their enemies would benefit from more female captives.
What are you implying with this?
women will always be physically less suitable for combat than men, barring some radical genetic modification.
Again, this is never brought up in 40k *at all*. So, frankly, sounds like a load of bull to me, when we're talking about 40k.
Altima wrote:
Grey Templar wrote: The ratio in the current miniature box, if you only use a single box and don't glob multiple boxes together, has 1/3 of the heads being female.
I have the Cadia box, and enough female heads are included to make everyone female, if one were so inclined.
Ah, finally, someone who can answer my question. I genuinely was unsure if my facts were wrong there, so thank you for clarifying.
Grey Templar - care to explain this discrepancy? I notice that you've dodged it every time I've mentioned it.
And the thing that just breaks your suspension of disbelief is the fact that women fight in equal numbers to men? And when told, by the creators themselves, that women fighting in the Guard is not anamous, has to cobble together out of context real world examples that don't apply or may not apply, as a reason to say, well, yeah, they fight, but not as much or as hard as the boys because men are just so much better at dying in a trench than girls.
This is the nail on the head for me. We're shown so many things that deviate from the world as we know it, so many cases of people doing things that are flat out inhuman, things that flat out ARE in human, and many of these things contradict one another, but the moment that GW unequivocally seem to say "yeah, women in the Imperial Guard are normal, here's all the cases where it's a thing", people suddenly clutch to "UMMMMM BUT IN REAL LIFE" and "WELL, THERE'S NO WAY THAT'S THE CASE BECAUSE IRL..." or "IT WOULD BE IMMERSION BREAKING TO HAVE MORE THAN 30% WOMEN BECAUSE CLEARLY 40K IS BASED ON REAL LIFE".
It's just funny that this only seems to apply to things like this. All the other outlandish and wacky parts of 40k are 100% fine, but women being a common sight in the military? Shock!! Horror!! My realism!!
Are you high? We've plateaued? Buddy, we don't even have a homogenized culture among our species right now. To say cultured has plateaued with regards to...well, any aspect or culture is not only absurd, it's outright laughable to the point of satire.
As a non-binary person, I find the idea of "we've plateaued, there's no real change from here, we're always gonna keep coming back to this exact point in culture" is either frankly insulting or laughably short-sighted.
Even in the US, in a relatively geo politically, extremely wealthy nation that doesn't need to worry about an outside enemy, its culture has become vastly different in just the last 100 years. In the past 100 years, the US has: become a world power, become a super power, had an industrial revolution, turned post industrial revolution, had women's suffrage, enshrined civil rights for minorities (who were [and arguably still are, but let's not get into that] treated as second class citizens), legalized--as in, allowed to exist without criminal punishment--homosexuals, given said people equal rights to heterosexuals, had several economic collapses, etc. The culture in one relatively stable nation across one century has change drastically. To say that it won't change any further is just silly.
Now take all that, add 38,000 years to it, and all the crap that's happened and continues to happen in 40k, and sure, what we have today is a median. Whatever you say, pal.
Exactly. As I address later, human civilisation and advancement, both technologically, socially, and culturally, has advanced so ridiculously far in just some people's lifetimes. We really would have no idea what the hell civilisations would look like in 1000 years, let alone 38,000. This idea that "we aren't gonna change too much from what we have now" is either the biggest bait on this thread, or it's just depressingly myopic.
WWW-STL wrote:All the radical changes of the 40K era are just emerging and tiny part in the entire history of human evolution. The entire evolutionary history of humans (not just Homo sapiens) has exceeded 3 million years, and the drastic changes of just a few tens of thousands of years are nothing
You seem hung up on biology. But look culturally - within a scant 100 years, if not slightly longer, in the 'West' homosexual marriage is legal, voting is now legal for all genders, trans rights and recognition has increased (and backslid), sexual liberation is high, and many racially prejudiced laws have been repealed. We only need look a few hundred years before that and we see the abolition of slavery, the rise of democracy and fall of monarchy, the industrial revolution, the rise of the middle class, and so on.
Humanity may have been around for several millennia, but our culture has never changed faster. Tell me, can you tell me what global cultures will emerge in 2124? 2524? 3024? If not, how the hell can you predict culture in M.41, beyond what GW has invented for their fictional world?
A more radical change means becoming something that no longer conforms to the current imperium’s legal definition.
And what do you know of the "current Imperium's legal definition"? Please, show me exactly what the Imperium says regarding this?
Grey Templar wrote:And I see no reason those cultural pressures wouldn't remain, even if all legal barriers have faded from memory and imagination, simply because humans are still humans.
Question - would you still use that argument to apply to slavery? Women not being allowed to vote? The prejudice against LGBTQ+ individuals? After all, "humans are still humans", and apparently culture doesn't affect anything over 38,000 years.
My reasoning seems to hold up just fine since the only counter arguments are personal attacks and hand wringing.
Your arguments don't hold up because they're not supported by any sociological logic.
I just don't see how any reasonable person could see someone using the real world as an extrapolation point to be "Pants on head lunacy". If the real world can't be used as a metric at all, then we can't make any guesses whatsoever.. Why are we even still here if that is the case? Just leave if that is your opinion, just leave the entire background section if that is your opinion since any discussion regarding the background would be kinda pointless with that standard.
40k isn't the real world. 40k is a fictional setting. You can *absolutely* make guesses... using the 40k background information, because that's what this subforum is about.
If you can't make a case by actually using the information given and either saying then why the background is "wrong" or should be changed to reflect a change you want to see in the real world depiction of the fictional setting, then maybe you're in the wrong forum. It seems that most other people here can have a perfectly good discussion about the *40k background* without needing to bring IRL into it. Sounds like a you problem, to be honest.
Overread wrote:
Crimson wrote: This is so obviously and blatantly ahistorical and absurd premise. After 200 000 years of human history, now at this moment you happen to be alive, the humanity has been perfected, achieved it's eternal natural state. Throughout history humans often though something like this, they were always wrong. What you posted is essentially an admission that you have no clue, so there is no point in discussing this with you.
I bet you there were many Romans who considered their society the height of what humanity could achieve, even whilst they had slavery and the Gladiator Games and such; plus Rome was around for what 500years give or take as a major power before it started falling aprt? Of course we still have things like boxing and ruby where you can get very serious short, long term and fatal health impacts. I could wager societies in the future might look back at the "soft bloodsports" and think them horrific that people would bet, gamble, pay vast sums and keep such a "Sport" alive.
Also for those considering social pressures; girls still get Barby and boys still get Action Man. The marketing behind many kids toys is exceptionally gender polarized, even today where some of those polarizations have weakened. A lot of things like that can mentally establish boundaries and ideas in kids minds that will shape their development and might be thoughts and impressions that they either never shed or which take ages to do so. Consider all the men who have considered "house work" as "womens work". Which is plainly not true for any man who has lived alone and had to make their own bed; wash their own laundry; do their own dishes and hoover their own carpets.
Quoting both of you, because you're absolutely spot on. And, as an enby individual, this whole idea of "there's no cultural effect on your behaviour, it's PURELY biology" is just flat out incorrect in an extreme sense.
It is so hard to determine what the Imperium decides is a "human" that the Administratum has to classify strains of humanity as "human" or "abhuman" and then decide which "abhumans" are to be sanctioned and which are to be purged.
I assume that what exists today is the median. A baseline around which individual human cultures will orbit, fluctuating in one way or the other but always returning to the baseline over thousands of years because culture isn't a continuous change forward, its more of a pendulum.
This is so obviously and blatantly ahistorical and absurd premise. After 200 000 years of human history, now at this moment you happen to be alive, the humanity has been perfected, achieved its eternal natural state. Throughout history humans often though something like this, they were always wrong. What you posted is essentially an admission that you have no clue, so there is no point in discussing this with you.
I think the salient point here has little to do with any sort of "pinnacle", and that throughout those 200000 years of history he vast majority of combat roles has been fulfilled by men. And by "vast", I mean . . . It's gotta be like 99%.
And it's not like that can't change, but the Imperium as a whole is a crazy mash up of forwards and backwards.
Insectum7 wrote: I think the salient point here has little to do with any sort of "pinnacle", and that throughout those 200000 years of history he vast majority of combat roles has been fulfilled by men. And by "vast", I mean . . . It's gotta be like 99%.
And if I'm not mistaken, nearly all of the societies which formed those militaries were patriarchal. You don't believe that had anything to do with it?
And it's not like that can't change, but the Imperium as a whole is a crazy mash up of forwards and backwards.
Agreed - but in terms of gender relations and roles, we don't see anything within the lore that suggests that the Imperium trends towards regression in terms of sexuality, ethnicity, or gender identity. It's simply not a thing we are shown, and in fact, we are shown and told quite the opposite.
And I see no reason those cultural pressures wouldn't remain, even if all legal barriers have faded from memory and imagination, simply because humans are still humans.
My reasoning seems to hold up just fine since the only counter arguments are personal attacks and hand wringing.
So have you not been reading all the posts pointing out the flaws in your argument then? Because people have been making plenty of counter arguments, and your only rebuttal seems to be putting your fingers in your ears and insisting that something that has changed radically in the last 100 years can't possibly continue to change in the next 38,000.
Like, on the face of it, you can see why your argument is coming off as silly, right?
And since you yourself say that 20% would be minimum for women to be seen as unremarkable I don't see why you have an issue with my reasoning. A 20% gap doesn't seem like an unreasonably large gap to me, so IDK why everyone is losing their mind over it.
The difference is that I'm not asserting that a major gender gap likely exists; I'm saying that 20%-50% is a likely range because less than 20 would make it weird that guardswomen go unremarked and because there isn't any strong evidence that women are the majority in the guard either. In contrast, you're making a firm assertion that a major gender gap does exist, and your argument in support of that assertion has been picked apart for pages now.
I just don't see how any reasonable person could see someone using the real world as an extrapolation point to be "Pants on head lunacy". If the real world can't be used as a metric at all, then we can't make any guesses whatsoever.. Why are we even still here if that is the case? Just leave if that is your opinion, just leave the entire background section if that is your opinion since any discussion regarding the background would be kinda pointless with that standard.
Now you're getting hyperbolic to try and make it more difficult to discuss the flaws in your argument.
We *can* use the real world to help understand a fictional one. However, we must also embrace what we know about the fictional world and about the real world's ability to change. Otherwise you're just cherry picking a somewhat-related factoid and then clutching onto it for dear life to avoid having to change your mind. Which is exactly what you seem to be doing.
We know that in the real world, men have always been the majority in the millitary including in the present day. However, we also know that there are some pretty major cultural factors behind that. We know that cultures can change dramatically over time, and we see in the lore that the imperium is a radically different culture from our own. Some of the ways in which it varies from our own is that it is in a long-term state of total war and has a great need for recruits. We also know that there are a ton of women in the 41st millenium who are perfectly capable of meeting whatever physical requirements the guard has in place. Thus, it seems more likely than not that the cultural factors discouraging women from serving in the millitary would likely no longer be widespread in the 41st millenium.
We also know that the number of women in the millitary has increased dramatically in the last century once it was, y'know, legal to do so. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the male-to-female ratio in real world millitaries continued to change dramatically in coming centuries given how new it is to a lot of modern cultures. So again, really weird that you insist the thing that has been changing dramatically irl can't possibly change in the future.
There's a relatively short summary of the points I've been making. Others have included plenty of points of their own. If you want to defend your stance in a way that might actually change some minds, you'll have to address the problems we've raised with your arguments.
Insectum7 wrote: I think the salient point here has little to do with any sort of "pinnacle", and that throughout those 200000 years of history he vast majority of combat roles has been fulfilled by men. And by "vast", I mean . . . It's gotta be like 99%.
And if I'm not mistaken, nearly all of the societies which formed those militaries were patriarchal. You don't believe that had anything to do with it?
And fwiw, while sexual dimorphism matters a lot less in the age of the lasgun, melee weapons and bows (which also require a lot of upper body strength) were the go-to weapons for the vast majority of human history. Which means that there would have been more reason for a gender gap *in the past*. In a world where that's not the case, we'd expect women to be more present in the millitary.
And it's not like that can't change, but the Imperium as a whole is a crazy mash up of forwards and backwards.
Agreed - but in terms of gender relations and roles, we don't see anything within the lore that suggests that the Imperium trends towards regression in terms of sexuality, ethnicity, or gender identity. It's simply not a thing we are shown, and in fact, we are shown and told quite the opposite.
100%
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ATTENTION. Psychic tests are unfluffy. Your longing for AV is understandable but misguided. Your chapter doesn't need a separate codex. Doctrines should go away. Being a "troop" means nothing. This has been a cranky service announcement. You may now resume your regularly scheduled arguing.
Probably the most relevant variable is how much emphasis an individual world is putting on rapid natural reproduction.
On worlds that are trying to raise additional Guard regiments, I imagine that contraceptives would be banned, and the Administatum and Ecclesiarchy would be emphasizing having large families. As a result more women would end up doing more child rearing and less of other things on these worlds.
Not every world would be optimizing natural reproduction though. As was mentioned in the book Long Shot, a disgruntled guardsman from an Agri World complained about having to wait many years to get a permit to have a child. That makes sense. They want to keep the Agri world populations small so they don't turn into hive worlds and suck up the food supply.
In other situations, critical supply shortages might mandate slowing natural population growth.
I imagine on worlds where natural reproduction is limited, or allowed to be limited by individual choices we'd see women doing more things in the labor force, and that would include fighting in the military.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2024/01/06 19:24:06
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Hive Worlds don't need to have a high birth rate to raise regiments, their populations are already way beyond what the IoM can realistically recruit, train and deploy.
So that limitations is only relevant in less developed worlds that are trying to raise their population.
Insectum7 wrote: I think the salient point here has little to do with any sort of "pinnacle", and that throughout those 200000 years of history he vast majority of combat roles has been fulfilled by men. And by "vast", I mean . . . It's gotta be like 99%.
And if I'm not mistaken, nearly all of the societies which formed those militaries were patriarchal. You don't believe that had anything to do with it?
No, I think the more obvious correlation is the biological one. I'd say "patriarchy" has little to do with it, as it would still be beneficial for a matriarchy to have male soldiery as the males still retain a significant advantage in historical combat over females.
And it's not like that can't change, but the Imperium as a whole is a crazy mash up of forwards and backwards.
Agreed - but in terms of gender relations and roles, we don't see anything within the lore that suggests that the Imperium trends towards regression in terms of sexuality, ethnicity, or gender identity. It's simply not a thing we are shown, and in fact, we are shown and told quite the opposite.
Well, the Emperor is male, the Primarchs were all male, Space Marines are all male, and many of the big-name heroes we're told about are male. On the macro-level it's still a culture that appears to primarily revolve around a bunch of "strongmen", even if the individual worlds can vary wildly (thank god). But being more progressive culturally doesn't change the biological underpinnings, so if you're still selecting for aggression and athleticism, or taking more "icky" things like repopulation into consideration, you still skew towards males.
Mind you, I'm heavily for female representation in the Guard and elsewhere. I'm just pointing out that male-dominated soldiery isn't merely cultural. Culture is intertwined with biology. In the debate of nature vs. nurture, the idea that it's just "nurture" is a non-starter.
Forget who pointed it out earlier, but the stronger muscles men usually have don't mean nearly as much when you're dealing with guns.
When battles are fought with raw musclepower, swords and bows and all that, more muscles help a lot. When you can be killed from 300' away with a twitch of the finger, muscles aren't as important.
Clocks for the clockmaker! Cogs for the cog throne!
Tyran wrote: Hive Worlds don't need to have a high birth rate to raise regiments, their populations are already way beyond what the IoM can realistically recruit, train and deploy.
So that limitations is only relevant in less developed worlds that are trying to raise their population.
Considering the Imperiums approach to a lot of things - eg people pulling on chains to reload the main guns on battleships - and heck even things like servitors and servoskulls and cogitators. All of that suggests that the Imperium has a vast over-population problem at large. They don't need to hyper focus on birth-rates. Indeed chances are the Imperium could do with a reduction in populations to be more stable. They won't do it though because so many things are tied up being done by people because of the fear of thinking machines. In addition they have no problem feeding this vast monster and it gives them a ready body of people ot recruit easily from for their constant state of war.
Now granted this leads to overpopulation stresses and strains and those are the funnels through which things like Chaos can seep and infect
JNAProductions wrote: Forget who pointed it out earlier, but the stronger muscles men usually have don't mean nearly as much when you're dealing with guns.
When battles are fought with raw musclepower, swords and bows and all that, more muscles help a lot. When you can be killed from 300' away with a twitch of the finger, muscles aren't as important.
Still means a lot wrt carrying all the kit soldiers need to lug about, and endurance for things like long marches. Being a bit larger and a bit stronger makes a significant difference.
Or even not getting pelvic injuries because you’re too short for the normal marching pace
Oh, look, another point made using an example of a modern volunteer army in peacetime instead of a dystopian conscription army on an eternal war footing.
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Gert wrote: Oh, look, another point made using an example of a modern volunteer army in peacetime.
A modern volunteer army that wants equality, values it’s personnel and cares about health and safety, and will slow things down to prevent injury - and people still get injured to that level in training.
The Imperium is not going to make allowances for those that can’t keep up and is not going to have sex-dependant physical standards.
If someone breaks themselves in basic training because they’re too small (regardless of sex) the Imperium are not going to go out on a limb to look after them, they’re just going to turn them into a servitor or corpse starch or something.
Gert wrote: Oh, look, another point made using an example of a modern volunteer army in peacetime instead of a dystopian conscription army on an eternal war footing.
and that point is relevant to the point of consitution and higher rate of bonedensity how? Or are we back again that bone density related issues are mere social imagination?
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And that means women won't get recruited why exactly?
It's not like civilians are coming from a world of privilege and safety into the harsh world of soldiering.
Chances are they're coming from a Hive where the chances of dying in the Guard are actually lower than staying in the Hive.
Time and time again we've seen examples of people of all shapes, sizes, sexes, genders, and abilities in the Guard so pretending that women would be excluded because of specific physical requirements is utter nonsense.
Gaunt's Ghosts have enough deaf soldiers to make a company for crying out loud.
You can bring up "pelvic injuries" or "bone density" all you want, but the background tells you that the Guard does not care about the people it recruits.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2024/01/06 22:01:36
Gert wrote: And that means women won't get recruited why exactly?
It's not like civilians are coming from a world of privilege and safety into the harsh world of soldiering.
Chances are they're coming from a Hive where the chances of dying in the Guard are actually lower than staying in the Hive.
Time and time again we've seen examples of people of all shapes, sizes, sexes, genders, and abilities in the Guard so pretending that women would be excluded because of specific physical requirements is utter nonsense.
Gaunt's Ghosts have enough deaf soldiers to make a company for crying out loud.
You can bring up "pelvic injuries" or "bone density" all you want, but the background tells you that the Guard does not care about the people it recruits.
The Imperium* are not going to discriminate against women actively or deliberately. The Imperium does not care about demographics or protected characteristics, it cares about getting stuff done. Whether that stuff is done by a man or a woman matters not.
However a certain amount of physical aptitude is going to be needed to be an effective guard soldier, especially when the default is the guard being the cream of the pdf.
Wherever that line is, proportionally more males are going to meet it. Vast numbers of women will also meet it, and indeed women are completely unremarkable in the Guard, but proportionally less will. Because the physical distribution for women tends to smaller and weaker (though obviously the two distributions have vast amounts of overlap).
Because of this, you would expect men to be a majority in the Guard, which is indeed what the novels, art and models all seem to indicate.
*as an institution, obviously it can vary between specific worlds/orgs (in both directions).
If anything, the marching pace thing would just sort of support the idea of segregated regiments rather than being a reason to discourage or drop female recruits.
ATTENTION. Psychic tests are unfluffy. Your longing for AV is understandable but misguided. Your chapter doesn't need a separate codex. Doctrines should go away. Being a "troop" means nothing. This has been a cranky service announcement. You may now resume your regularly scheduled arguing.
Lord Zarkov wrote: The Imperium* are not going to discriminate against women actively or deliberately. The Imperium does not care about demographics or protected characteristics, it cares about getting stuff done. Whether that stuff is done by a man or a woman matters not.
Why does the post need to go further than this? Why is it so important that this is quantified in any way? What actual purpose does it serve?
JNAProductions wrote: Forget who pointed it out earlier, but the stronger muscles men usually have don't mean nearly as much when you're dealing with guns.
When battles are fought with raw musclepower, swords and bows and all that, more muscles help a lot. When you can be killed from 300' away with a twitch of the finger, muscles aren't as important.
I 100% agree, but it's also been pointed out that "soldiering" involves a lot more than just combat, and alot of it is just carrying heavy ***t.
Lord Zarkov wrote: The Imperium* are not going to discriminate against women actively or deliberately. The Imperium does not care about demographics or protected characteristics, it cares about getting stuff done. Whether that stuff is done by a man or a woman matters not.
Why does the post need to go further than this? Why is it so important that this is quantified in any way? What actual purpose does it serve?
Discussing the background as it is presented to us by GW as is the intent of this sub-forum?
Discussing the background as it is presented to us by GW as is the intent of this sub-forum?
Yes, that is the purpose of this sub forum. So that's why I am perplexed why there is this crazy amount of discussion about the real world militaries and the real world culture in general here, as that is obviously off topic.
Lord Zarkov wrote: Discussing the background as it is presented to us by GW as is the intent of this sub-forum?
Except you are neither discussing 40k background nor discussing it as is presented.
You keep bringing up modern-day examples to justify your arguments when time and time again the background as presented by GW has shown and told you the opposite.
You say that there "must" be physical standards for the Guard and that there "must" be biological reasons to prevent large numbers of women in the Guard yet the 40k background at no point agrees with your assertions.
We have soldiers who are small, tall, young, old, heavy, thin, deaf, one-eye, half-bionic, pumped full of drugs, or have manifested psychic powers but having a large number of women in the Guard is a step too far and it must be quantified as a low number.
All you are doing is denying what is written in plain ink and I cannot fathom why.
Insectum7 wrote: I think the salient point here has little to do with any sort of "pinnacle", and that throughout those 200000 years of history he vast majority of combat roles has been fulfilled by men. And by "vast", I mean . . . It's gotta be like 99%.
And if I'm not mistaken, nearly all of the societies which formed those militaries were patriarchal. You don't believe that had anything to do with it?
No, I think the more obvious correlation is the biological one. I'd say "patriarchy" has little to do with it, as it would still be beneficial for a matriarchy to have male soldiery as the males still retain a significant advantage in historical combat over females.
Perhaps true in an age of predominantly hand-to-hand combat, but a lasgun doesn't need that.
And it's not like that can't change, but the Imperium as a whole is a crazy mash up of forwards and backwards.
Agreed - but in terms of gender relations and roles, we don't see anything within the lore that suggests that the Imperium trends towards regression in terms of sexuality, ethnicity, or gender identity. It's simply not a thing we are shown, and in fact, we are shown and told quite the opposite.
Well, the Emperor is male, the Primarchs were all male, Space Marines are all male, and many of the big-name heroes we're told about are male.
In "defence" of that, that's because the Primarchs, Space Marines, and Custodes were designed that way, and have "genetic reasons" to be male (something something hormones, which I think ought to be scrapped, but that's a different topic) - that's not a "WE LOVE MEN" ostensibly, it's a "men just happen to be all that this works on" (again, something I'd personally change, but I digress).
On the macro-level it's still a culture that appears to primarily revolve around a bunch of "strongmen", even if the individual worlds can vary wildly (thank god).
I still don't think I agree. Of the current crop of the HLOT, the actual people running the show still, isn't there a fairly even split of men and women?
But being more progressive culturally doesn't change the biological underpinnings, so if you're still selecting for aggression and athleticism, or taking more "icky" things like repopulation into consideration, you still skew towards males.
That's assuming they're selecting for aggression and athleticism, or that the bar is anywhere near enough to matter between most men and women. If there is a bar, I genuinely don't believe it's too high on many worlds.
Lord Zarkov wrote:
Gert wrote: Oh, look, another point made using an example of a modern volunteer army in peacetime.
The Imperium is not going to make allowances for those that can’t keep up and is not going to have sex-dependant physical standards.
If someone breaks themselves in basic training because they’re too small (regardless of sex) the Imperium are not going to go out on a limb to look after them, they’re just going to turn them into a servitor or corpse starch or something.
Except the Tanith show that women hold up just fine, and that there's plenty of disabled troopers in the Tanith who still keep up.
If women were so fragile, you'd think that the Tanith regiments would have dried up by now.
Lord Zarkov wrote:The Imperium* are not going to discriminate against women actively or deliberately. The Imperium does not care about demographics or protected characteristics, it cares about getting stuff done. Whether that stuff is done by a man or a woman matters not.
Agreed. That's why they recruit women, because women can fire lasguns and get eaten by Tyranids just as well - we simply do not see a case where the bar is set that it meaningfully prevents able bodied (and even disabled) women from joining the Guard.
Insectum7 wrote:
JNAProductions wrote: Forget who pointed it out earlier, but the stronger muscles men usually have don't mean nearly as much when you're dealing with guns.
When battles are fought with raw musclepower, swords and bows and all that, more muscles help a lot. When you can be killed from 300' away with a twitch of the finger, muscles aren't as important.
I 100% agree, but it's also been pointed out that "soldiering" involves a lot more than just combat, and alot of it is just carrying heavy ***t.
True, but we also see plenty of Guardsmen in the Tanith regiment who aren't exactly built for that. What's their excuse?
Discussing the background as it is presented to us by GW as is the intent of this sub-forum?
Yes, that is the purpose of this sub forum. So that's why I am perplexed why there is this crazy amount of discussion about the real world militaries and the real world culture in general here, as that is obviously off topic.
Quite.
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Gert wrote: We have soldiers who are small, tall, young, old, heavy, thin, deaf, one-eye, half-bionic, pumped full of drugs, or have manifested psychic powers but having a large number of women in the Guard is a step too far and it must be quantified as a low number.
This. I don't doubt that there may be a majority, for whatever reason, but I also do feel the need to call out the slew of arguments that say "women = weaker" as if that seems to matter in any way to the conversation. From *everything* we see, it genuinely seems like the Imperium does not care. The only thing that seems to contradict that is when people bring in arguments from outside the 40k background sphere - and that's why there's a clapback against those arguments, because they're at odds with the world GW has constructed.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2024/01/06 23:45:12
Lord Zarkov wrote: Discussing the background as it is presented to us by GW as is the intent of this sub-forum?
Except you are neither discussing 40k background nor discussing it as is presented.
You keep bringing up modern-day examples to justify your arguments when time and time again the background as presented by GW has shown and told you the opposite.
You say that there "must" be physical standards for the Guard and that there "must" be biological reasons to prevent large numbers of women in the Guard yet the 40k background at no point agrees with your assertions.
We have soldiers who are small, tall, young, old, heavy, thin, deaf, one-eye, half-bionic, pumped full of drugs, or have manifested psychic powers but having a large number of women in the Guard is a step too far and it must be quantified as a low number.
All you are doing is denying what is written in plain ink and I cannot fathom why.
That is misrepresenting my position massively (though not I’ll admit that of some other posters in the thread).
There *are* large numbers of women in the Guard, pretty objectively and I (and others) have stated as such repeatedly.
However the depictions in the lore show a majority of men, the depictions in the art show a majority of men, and the depictions in the models show a majority of men - which really build a picture that the Guard are indeed a majority men.
*Why* that might be is an interesting point to discuss - certainly more interesting than “lalala the writers are biased so the depictions must be wrong” as some people have been coming across. *How much* that imbalance is could be an interesting discussion, but imo there’s really not enough data to say much beyond ‘enough that it’s noticeable, but not so much that women are in any way rare’.
Given the stories also generally depict women being in average smaller than men like irl (though with a much larger range on both sides), that would seem to me the most likely reason that the gender balance is how it’s generally portrayed. Given how the Imperium works, it’s unlikely to be direct discrimination imo. Maybe you disagree?
Qualitative comparisons to irl can support that as they still tell us something about human biology (though quantitative comparisons are obviously pretty useless).
Lord Zarkov wrote: However the depictions in the lore show a majority of men, the depictions in the art show a majority of men, and the depictions in the models show a majority of men - which really build a picture that the Guard are indeed a majority men.
*Why* that might be is an interesting point to discuss - certainly more interesting than “lalala the writers are biased so the depictions must be wrong” as some people have been coming across. *How much* that imbalance is could be an interesting discussion, but imo there’s really not enough data to say much beyond ‘enough that it’s noticeable, but not so much that women are in any way rare’.
Okay, seeing as this seems to mock my position on the matter - let's talk about that. Why do you think that the 2003 Cadian Shock Troops kit contains all male/masc heads, and the current Cadian Shock Troops kit contains enough heads to have an all-women unit? Why are women Cadians more prevalent in artwork now compared to previous artwork?
