[General Battuta]

I'm all for talent first.. Even if i have none, it'll make the end product that much more special

We have forty-two roles in total, I believe, and that's counting every single minor player, so I'm pretty sure everyone will find their place in this...so long as nine of them are women.

33 to 9? Good lord! Considered gender-swapping some of them?

[Desertfox287]

mostly men in the military afaik. Yes, that is my pathetic excuse for them to let this slide, but it's up to them.

[General Battuta]

Not in the GTVA, where the gender ratio even in elite boarding parties is pretty good, and where the pilot corps is, if not quite 50-50, at least 1/3rd female (and the Vasudans do better at 50/50, I believe.)

[Thaeris]

Where do those figures come from, Battuta?

[General Battuta]

Personas, and the Hallfight cutscene.

If logic held they'd both be 50/50.

[Thaeris]

AHA!

^I cite fanon!

<Thaeris, suddenly stops, looks about, and slightly regrets stooping to your level to point out some type of fanon, no matter how rational or sensible it may be...>

 

[Scotty]

Correlation does not imply causation.  Just because there are roughly equal numbers of pilot personas for mission design does not mean that there are equal numbers of pilots for each gender.  We have no canon figures on the matter.

[Goober5000]

Personas, and the Hallfight cutscene.

If logic held they'd both be 50/50.

If logic held they'd both be 100/0.  But computer games are seldom entirely logical.  We have to work with what we're given.

[General Battuta]

Personas, and the Hallfight cutscene.

If logic held they'd both be 50/50.

If logic held they'd both be 100/0.  But computer games are seldom entirely logical.  We have to work with what we're given.

Excuse me?

Women aren't uniformly better pilots than men (which is I hope what you're suggesting), and men certainly aren't uniformly better infantry (though they mostly are.)

AHA!

^I cite fanon!

<Thaeris, suddenly stops, looks about, and slightly regrets stooping to your level to point out some type of fanon, no matter how rational or sensible it may be...>

 

Persona distributions are perfectly canonical. Interpretations of them are, of course, up for discussion, but there's no denying that of the five Terran pilot personas two are female, and of the boarding party in Hallfight at least one was a woman.

And I know you're better than petty personal attacks. Salve the sore ego and keep this on the level.

Correlation does not imply causation.  Just because there are roughly equal numbers of pilot personas for mission design does not mean that there are equal numbers of pilots for each gender.  We have no canon figures on the matter.

Nice try, but this has nothing to do with correlation or causation (go look up the terms before you throw them about.) What we have instead is called a 'representative sample.'

Actually, seriously, let me do a triple take and look at this again. What are you even trying to say? Nobody's attempting to establish a relationship between two variables here: there's only one.

[Goober5000]

Personas, and the Hallfight cutscene.

If logic held they'd both be 50/50.

If logic held they'd both be 100/0.  But computer games are seldom entirely logical.  We have to work with what we're given.

Excuse me?

Women aren't uniformly better pilots than men (which is I hope what you're suggesting), and men certainly aren't uniformly better infantry (though they mostly are.)

You need to think through the larger social implications instead of the narrow focus of whether a man and a woman are equally capable of performing a particular job.

At the time FS1 begins, the Terrans and Vasudans had been involved in a grueling war, with no end in sight, for fourteen years.  The war had the perceived (if, perhaps, not real) threat of annihilation, or indefinite subjugation, of the losing side.  Then the Shivans came along and started blowing ships up left and right, and glassing colony worlds, and annihilation started actually happening before everyone's eyes.  By some miracle the Shivans are stopped and disappear for 32 years, but there is constant vigilance for when they might come back.  Eventually the Shivans do return, and not only do they pulverize an already-weakened fleet, they obliterate an entire star system.

So in all FreeSpace eras during which the games are set, there is a widespread legitimate fear for the very survival of each species.  In this situation any society with an ounce of self-preservation would have all available females of child-bearing age safely planetside making babies as fast as possible.  Having a large family would, in fact, be seen as patriotic.  It would be considered the height of idiocy to send a perfectly fertile female out to her death in a rickety one-person fighter.

And this would be orders of magnitude more important for the Vasudans, as they lost four billion people when Vasuda Prime was attacked.

[Colonol Dekker]

I like your thinking Goob. Come run England for a bit plox.

[Rian]

Frankly? I’d prefer extinction.

[General Battuta]

**** no.

The re-subjugation of females would do more political, economic, military and cultural damage than the loss of half the planets in the Alliance.

Women are not baby machines. Population does not win ****.

If the Shivans are coming it doesn't matter if you have ten million or ten trillion people on your worlds: they'll all burn real nicely. You need the infrastructure to build a military, the science to keep it going, and a citizenry that'll stand for the war. All of which require the best and the brightest, not a bunch of wombs on legs.

Depopulation is not the concern here. (Hell, overpopulation probably is.)

So, in this situation? Any society with an ounce of self-preservation would be doing its level best to prevent that scenario, because it means the loss of half the skilled workforce and an unsustainable, reckless population boom.

I cannot imagine the catastrophe you'd get by cutting the skilled candidate pool for military and industrial-critical jobs in half. And no, you couldn't fill that gap with male candidates without dropping qualifications.

[Dilmah G]

I cannot imagine the catastrophe you'd get by cutting the skilled candidate pool for military and industrial-critical jobs in half.

Oh jeez, I dunno if it would be by half. I'm not condoning Goob's thinking, but being an FJ Pilot simply doesn't appeal to as many women as it does men. Go no further than today's Air Forces. Or the fields that people who make good pilots typically come from. How many female tradies do you see on a daily basis?

Sure, there'd be women, but I don't think, even with the threat of extinction, that the gender ratio of pilots in the Alliance would be 50-50. Somewhere close, possibly.

EDIT:

It would be considered the height of idiocy to send a perfectly fertile female out to her death in a rickety one-person fighter.

Where have we ever seen the Alliance adopt anything close to this kind of thinking?

[General Battuta]

Nice assumption there. I like how you assume that today's skewed gender ratio (less than half a century after the option became available) is because it 'doesn't appeal to women'.

Today's Air Forces have steadily increasing numbers of women. The female candidates for the Mercury program were far more experienced and capable than the men.

Moreover, it would never happen. It's akin to saying 'with extinction so close, we can't afford to pay our workers. The logical thing to do is to enslave a quarter of the population again.'

[Thaeris]

So in all FreeSpace eras during which the games are set, there is a widespread legitimate fear for the very survival of each species.  In this situation any society with an ounce of self-preservation would have all available females of child-bearing age safely planetside making babies as fast as possible.  Having a large family would, in fact, be seen as patriotic.  It would be considered the height of idiocy to send a perfectly fertile female out to her death in a rickety one-person fighter.

NEWWW ZEEEEAALAND!!!

 

Furthermore Battuta, you'll note my previous post was mostly in jest. However, I do find that the "logical musings" I've devised in the past, no matter how sound, were often critized by none other than yourself. Regardless, I hope I've not offended you.

[General Battuta]

Adding elements to canon is fanon. Acknowledging the gender ratios present in the Hallfight cutscene and the pilot .anis is not.

[Thaeris]

That's still very circumstantial - there's no hard numbers to go by.

I'm not saying it's not a good assesment, but there's not enough evidence to validate it as canon. I personally can "roll with it," but declaring it as fact is a little shady. Put it into your own fiction and no one will argue with it. 

[Ransom]

Fiction rarely supplies hard numbers. The only information available points to Battuta's conclusion, so what's the alternative?

To answer the original question: most of those 33 male roles are minor, and those are being cast using templates. Gender for those parts isn't set in stone. The ratio of women to men will be roughly proportional to that of the auditions we receive. I do agree that the weighting is poor as it stands.

[Colonol Dekker]

I'm hoping for a C-list role at least ^_^