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I don't get what one's sex has to do with the hobby or why someone bothered making a poll. It's not like anyone haven't seen the demographics when going to a retailer, tourny and so on.

It seems quite contrived.

 stanman wrote:
Based on posts on Dakka I'm fairly convinced that transgendered female miniatures gamers outnumber CIS female miniatures gamers by a significant margin. Which has me wondering what the ratio of transgender vs CIS female miniature gamers is? No agenda, just curiosity.

I honestly don't know. My FLGS has a significant number of women that frequent it, nearly as many as there are men, but most of them are only there for the MTG and Infinity stuff the store stocks. Although there are a few 40k players. I'm not sure if any are Male-to-female Transgendered, though.

The poll is showing roughly 7% as being female (combined) but in my local experience I think it's probably less than that. There's one female miniature gamer that I know that frequents our local GW and easily about 50 males so it's maybe 2% of the population (or less?). In my immediate game group we have 1 female out of 12 of us but she never games at stores or events and also sticks to either video games, card games, or board games, zombicide is about as heavy of a miniatures games as she'll play. I went to Adepticon and I don't recall seeing a single female player there out of 200-300 players, at least for 40k. There may have been a few playing that I didn't notice as I was primarily just looking at the miniatures and armies, but the impression that I had was that almost the entire player base was male, there were females attending but they were in a very small minority and none of them seemed to be playing.

I recall seeing at least a few women in the vendor hall, playing board games or were at some of the painting events etc but maybe the style of 40k is something that women tend not to be very interested in or even might find it distasteful? I've noticed that online videos games and MMOs tend to have the largest portion of female gamers so maybe it has something to do with the type of game play or visual style of games.

I feel offended.

There should have been an option for Slaaneshis, that identify as both.
I really cant understand how some people can still put up a poll that only has TWO genders in it.
ITS 2018 WAKE UP!

There are more genders than male and female and everybodies knows that by now!

First off... wtf does it matter? It shouldn't.
We all need to get over our hangups about what is in other peoples pants... and just enjoy our time in our fantasy land with whoever comes up to the table.

For the love of The Emperor, you can almost feel the societal shift as time passes.

I have deleted a ton of off-topic posts ITT. Please don't post further discussion about political correctness etc here. If you want to discuss such matters, generally speaking the best place is one of the politics threads in the Off Tooic subforum. Thanks!


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As a reminder, failure to comply with moderator instructions will result in a suspension.

Not a political statement.

I identify as a Haemonculus, we dont have genders just more arms and heads than others.

See my profile picture, thats me

I'm neither male nor female as I am an android. Die meatbags!

I legit appreciate that "Transitioning to female" is included with Female, not a separate thing. Your a pretty Rad person!

I've mentioned before on here that I'm Transgender. Well I don't go around shouting it from the rooftops, it is a part of my identity and who I am. I hope one day more people can understand that, and not feel uncomfortable around me when they learn that.

Oh dear wargaming is a massive sausage fest, who knew? And to think I only took up The Hobby to meet girls.

 feeder wrote:
14% of the KoW tourney I participated in on Saturday was female.

That's cool. My LGS is at least 14-20% female , but they're in for D&D and/or Magic. I thought wargames were more dramatically skewed than that.
OP should note that 40k is an especially macho game/setting. Fantasy war games are going to see more crossover from the fantasy gaming women.


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da_emprah wrote:
I've been saying for years that we need more women in this hobby, and GW keeps not releasing plastic Sisters. I'm of the opinion that If there was a predominantly female army to play (Besides Nids and Eldar), with some proper marketing to the demographic you'd see a shift in that ratio. My 11 year old daughter's eyes lit up when she saw Celestine + Geminae painted and immediately asked me if there was a whole army like that she could play. I said yes, but they're all metal and mostly out of stock everywhere, She pouted until I did a squad of Seraphim to tag along and now she regularly plays Inquisimunda with them. If they had plastics she could grab an infantry box every few weeks by squirreling away allowance money 'til she could play full scale 40k, but as it is she'll be lucky to field 2000 points by the time she starts high school.

Awww, that's cute.
As I implied in my last post, I think it's a matter of setting. 40k and historicals are both overwhelmingly masculine: indeed, one could say that in real history, being conscripted to war was the second-suckiest part of the masculine gender role, after working to death in a mine. I personally looove history, but in a more holistic, "girly" way than military history. So I'm going to do historical wargaming, but I'm an outlier, and I got here from tabletop RPGs and a love of history in general. Escapist fantasy with female troops is going to be more attractive than grim historical reality or exaggerated grimdark, I think.

I've got a different set of hobbies with my wife and a different set of hobbies with female friends.

If they don't enjoy Warhammer 40k, that is okay with me. It would be nice once in a while to have a female interested in my hobby, but playing/hobbying against/with only males is perfectly fine. I think its even healthy for certain parts of the male psyche, that some things remain exclusively a male activity.


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Gilda wrote:
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da_emprah wrote:
I've been saying for years that we need more women in this hobby, and GW keeps not releasing plastic Sisters. I'm of the opinion that If there was a predominantly female army to play (Besides Nids and Eldar), with some proper marketing to the demographic you'd see a shift in that ratio. My 11 year old daughter's eyes lit up when she saw Celestine + Geminae painted and immediately asked me if there was a whole army like that she could play. I said yes, but they're all metal and mostly out of stock everywhere, She pouted until I did a squad of Seraphim to tag along and now she regularly plays Inquisimunda with them. If they had plastics she could grab an infantry box every few weeks by squirreling away allowance money 'til she could play full scale 40k, but as it is she'll be lucky to field 2000 points by the time she starts high school.

Awww, that's cute.
As I implied in my last post, I think it's a matter of setting. 40k and historicals are both overwhelmingly masculine: indeed, one could say that in real history, being conscripted to war was the second-suckiest part of the masculine gender role, after working to death in a mine. I personally looove history, but in a more holistic, "girly" way than military history. So I'm going to do historical wargaming, but I'm an outlier, and I got here from tabletop RPGs and a love of history in general. Escapist fantasy with female troops is going to be more attractive than grim historical reality or exaggerated grimdark, I think.

I agree, I think it would be a great idea for GW to market a new army or two along with the Sisters to a female audience. At the very least, a wider audience. It would be healthy for the hobby.

I identify as an attack helicopter. I'm offended.

Female transitioning into a caffeine addicted insomniac lol

but on the more serious side, I have never met another female war gamer, I am the one in my family that has to push for a game, hubby will play if I organise it. I am also the person in the family who has painted all of our armies (our eldest son now paints his own now he has moved across the country) I also build terrain as a part time bill paying activity.

I am also one of the rare female grognards who DMs 1st edition AD&D.

 LumenPraebeo wrote:


I agree, I think it would be a great idea for GW to market a new army or two along with the Sisters to a female audience. At the very least, a wider audience. It would be healthy for the hobby.

I am all for femmed-up armies and rebooted sisters but realistically it will have virtually zero effect on drawing ladies to the hobby. It will just be guys buying them. I don't think anyone, male, female or attack helicopter buys into wargaming because they narcissitically want to see their own gender identity on the tabletop. If that were so then who is buying orks, necrons and tyranids??!!

It is actually a little insulting to women to assume they will only go straight for the miniatures which most look like barbie dolls and won't touch anything else.

Nothing in what LumenPraebeo wrote indicated that an army geared towards female players should look like "barbie dolls".

I won't hazard to suggest what aesthetics female wargamers might like, that would be something perhaps Games Workshop might invest in focus groups for (although afaik they are averse to market research and queerly proud of it).

In my extremely anecdotal and limited experience, all the female hobbyists I know seem to like Tyranids.

 Ouze wrote:
Nothing in what LumenPraebeo wrote indicated that an army geared towards female players should look like "barbie dolls".

I won't hazard to suggest what aesthetics female wargamers might like, that would be something perhaps Games Workshop might invest in focus groups for (although afaik they are averse to market research and queerly proud of it).

In my extremely anecdotal and limited experience, all the female hobbyists I know seem to like Tyranids.

Thank you Ouze. I notice in RPG games, female players roll magic focused characters more often than say rangers, rogues, or warriors. Or if they want to dabble with something new, they go for hybrid classes, such as paladins, druids, and witchslayers. So, an army marketed toward potential female players can be themed around that. Ultimately, I'm not so familiar with the female psyche. GW would NEED to hire some female market analysts if they want to do it right. That is, if they want to at all.

 LumenPraebeo wrote:

 Ouze wrote:
Nothing in what LumenPraebeo wrote indicated that an army geared towards female players should look like "barbie dolls".

I won't hazard to suggest what aesthetics female wargamers might like, that would be something perhaps Games Workshop might invest in focus groups for (although afaik they are averse to market research and queerly proud of it).

In my extremely anecdotal and limited experience, all the female hobbyists I know seem to like Tyranids.

Thank you Ouze. I notice in RPG games, female players roll magic focused characters more often than say rangers, rogues, or warriors. Or if they want to dabble with something new, they go for hybrid classes, such as paladins, druids, and witchslayers. So, an army marketed toward potential female players can be themed around that. Ultimately, I'm not so familiar with the female psyche. GW would NEED to higher some female market analysts if they want to do it right. That is, if they want to at all.

As a female player and DM these types of characters are far from my preferred, this is largely the same for other female players I know.

substantially changing a game to market to the perceived likes of the opposite gender to the majority of players runs a high risk of alienating existing players.

Non-binary/genderqueer. Not ashamed of it, not frightened to say so.

Come at me, Brosef Fritzl.

 Excommunicatus wrote:
Non-binary/genderqueer. Not ashamed of it, not frightened to say so.

Come at me, Brosef Fritzl.

I say right on.

i could have sworn i actually answered this thing before but maybe i just answered the poll? Anyhow, I am a woman person. My preferred armies are the ones that are sneaky, and my preferred fantasy class is giant barbarians. None of this means anything other than that they are the things that i like.

I do know women who game, i'm related to them.

I identify as Machine
Bow before your mechanical overlord, Shodan did nothing wrong.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
I identify as Machine
Bow before your mechanical overlord, Shodan did nothing wrong.

All hail our new gender overlords!

 Hollow wrote:
I identify as an attack helicopter. I'm offended.

Deeply offended. I suspect we have more attack helicopters here than we imagined. Some people might be transitioning to becoming an attack helicopter. I remember that first time when I was little, that I wondered if I spun around really fast with my arms out... perhaps I could fly...

 Lockark wrote:
I legit appreciate that "Transitioning to female" is included with Female, not a separate thing. Your a pretty Rad person!

I've mentioned before on here that I'm Transgender. Well I don't go around shouting it from the rooftops, it is a part of my identity and who I am. I hope one day more people can understand that, and not feel uncomfortable around me when they learn that.

Right on! Im working on transitioning to Female myself and I've found a lot of support at my local gaming spot (I was worried it would be a bunch of trolls but it turns out it was NOT the old neckbeards but instead the young religious types who were the ones who denied my existence). Funny thing is I've become a lot less of a competitive gamer and now I just play for the social interaction. I think that was my goal all along but social conventions made me think I had to compete to have a good time. Now im just your typical fluff bunny Guard player (I own a Ushanka hat to go with my Valhallans!)

Trusylver wrote:

 LumenPraebeo wrote:

 Ouze wrote:
Nothing in what LumenPraebeo wrote indicated that an army geared towards female players should look like "barbie dolls".

I won't hazard to suggest what aesthetics female wargamers might like, that would be something perhaps Games Workshop might invest in focus groups for (although afaik they are averse to market research and queerly proud of it).

In my extremely anecdotal and limited experience, all the female hobbyists I know seem to like Tyranids.

Thank you Ouze. I notice in RPG games, female players roll magic focused characters more often than say rangers, rogues, or warriors. Or if they want to dabble with something new, they go for hybrid classes, such as paladins, druids, and witchslayers. So, an army marketed toward potential female players can be themed around that. Ultimately, I'm not so familiar with the female psyche. GW would NEED to higher some female market analysts if they want to do it right. That is, if they want to at all.

As a female player and DM these types of characters are far from my preferred, this is largely the same for other female players I know.

substantially changing a game to market to the perceived likes of the opposite gender to the majority of players runs a high risk of alienating existing players.

A few female alt heads for the IG/AM wouldn't be a huge ask, and it would go a long way. Even the usual suspects couldn't whinge about it because it's repeatedly backed up in fluff and they'd still be optional.

It's not simply that GW isn't outreaching to potential female players, it doesn't even leave room for them if they do manage to make their own way in.

FWIW, while I'm not defending GW's insistence on ignoring female Guard that clearly and prominently exist in the fluff at all, for about $65 CAD you can get enough bitz from Victoria Miniatures to make 24 Cadians female.

I don't know of any attack-helicopter bitz compatible with the AM range, but if you're clever enough to come up with such a truly original and hilarious 'bit', you probably don't need my help.

 Excommunicatus wrote:
FWIW, while I'm not defending GW's insistence on ignoring female Guard that clearly and prominently exist in the fluff at all, for about $65 CAD you can get enough bitz from Victoria Miniatures to make 24 Cadians female.

I don't know of any attack-helicopter bitz compatible with the AM range, but if you're clever enough to come up with such a truly original and hilarious 'bit', you probably don't need my help.

Victoria is where its at when it comes to getting your female guard. She does fantastic work, I just wish it was cheaper!

Third-party bits in general are pretty expensive. Cadians look like potatoes anyway so here's hoping GW updates them sometime.