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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.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
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.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2023/12/02 14:31:43
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 message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2023/12/02 14:34:43
Please excuse any spelling errors. I use a tablet frequently and software keyboards are a pain!
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.
Fed up of Scalpers? But still want your Exclusives? Why not join us?
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...
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2023/12/02 15:36:38
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.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2023/12/02 16:18:39
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.
Please excuse any spelling errors. I use a tablet frequently and software keyboards are a pain!
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.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2023/12/03 11:10:02
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.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2023/12/04 07:10:47
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.
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?
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2023/12/04 03:27:59
Waiting for my shill money from Spiral Arm Studios
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.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2023/12/04 05:17:44
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.
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?
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2023/12/04 07:48:52
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.
Fed up of Scalpers? But still want your Exclusives? Why not join us?
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.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2023/12/04 12:38:35
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.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
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.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2023/12/04 15:48:22
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.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2023/12/04 16:16:14
ChargerIIC wrote: If algae farm paste with a little bit of your grandfather in it isn't Grimdark I don't know what is.
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%.
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.
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