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 AldarionTelcontar wrote:

There is no reason to assume that Arbites have the same requirements as the PDF, let alone the guard. Modern police - excluding Special Forces - have physical test on entrance...

lol, ok.

Arbites aren't "modern police".
They come from the same place as Scions, Sororitas, Inquisitors, and Commissars. Precints of 50-60 are expected to be able to act as a precursor force to reclamation by the Imperium if a world turns renegade.

and after that it is mostly chair and donut time. Most policemen are in no better shape than your average civilian office worker.

Try meeting actual police officers rather than just watching TV shows? As much as I feel like police here in the US are woefully underqualified--it isn't from their exercise regimens.

 AldarionTelcontar wrote:

 Nevelon wrote:
Even if you have standards where men are going to out perform women, how high is the bar? If the average man is at 6, and the average woman is at 5, does it mater if the guard only needs you at 3?

Sure, they would prefer an army full of 10s, but they get what they get and use them.

Welcome to the guard, here is your lasgun and flack vest. Go die for the Imperium.

Problem is that average woman is lot lower than 5, and Guard (generally) needs you at lot higher than 6.

Average adult woman will lose in a fight against a 16 year old boy. That is a fact. The moment boys enter puberty, their physical ability vis-a-vis women skyrockets.

When I was in university, I once playwrestled with a female colleague... neither of us was in great physical shape, we were similar in size and build... yet despite that, it was like wrestling a kid. I had to be careful not to hurt her.

And sure, you don't need much physical strength to fight when you have a lasgun. Hell, even knights didn't need to be that physically strong - weapons are a great equalizer.

However, men, physically, simply have significant advantages over women.

Let's take a man and a woman of the same size - same height, weight and overall fitness level.

Man will still have far denser bones, thus significantly improving resistance to injury. And I don't mean just "breaking a bone", but also cumulative injuries under effort. It also means that said bones are better at protecting internal organs from injury - and that matters, because armor can only dissipate force, not cancel it outright (until you get into stuff like forcefields, which is no longer armor).

Man will also have far greater proportion of fast-twitch muscle fibers, meaning far greater ability to exercise force - in a fight or otherwise. Greater muscle strength relative to mass also means that he will be less likely to suffer injury during fairly normal activities - such as marching, setting up camp, digging trenches...

This greater proportion of fast-twitch muscle fibers also means faster reaction time, which means better ability to avoid getting hit in the first place.

Male brain is also better adopted to reading mechanical aspects such as speed, depth and distance (where female brain is better at reading faces and emotions). Thus, men will be better able to target the enemy.

Men are also psychologically more aggressive than women.

In short, a man that is of the same size as a woman will have far more advantages than, say, a man going up against another man much smaller than himself - and at the same time will have none of the disadvantages that come with increased mass.

Of course, as Mad Doc says, there are things to consider such as abhumans... but for baseline humans, which are the majority in the Imperium? No.

So to put it simply: there is no obstacle to there being women in the Imperium Guard. But it also makes no sense for them to be 50% or even overall a significant percentage of the Imperial Guard.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Not directly related, but I just recalled that in one of the arbites novels, a psyker tries to psychically attack a high-ranking arbite by making her think she's in an alternate version of her life where she's clumsy and out of shape, and her response is to start doing some exercises.

It's neither the guard nor even "reality." However, the implication is that a scenario where an arbite could be notably clumsy and out of shape (iirc I think the text may have suggested that she was a little pudgy in this scenario) was considered realistic to not be immediately illusion-shattering. I know that some specialized arbites have desk jobs, but I still feel like your average low-ranking arbite (which is what she was in this scenario) would still need to meet certain physical requirements. I'd be kind of surprised if those requirements weren't at least in the same ballpark as the requirements for the guard.

So if we're comfortable assuming arbites have requirements similar to the guard, and if being clumsy and out of shape isn't a disqualifier for being an arbites, then a reasonably in-shape woman probably meets the requirements for being in the guard.

There is no reason to assume that Arbites have the same requirements as the PDF, let alone the guard.

Modern police - excluding Special Forces - have physical test on entrance... and after that it is mostly chair and donut time. Most policemen are in no better shape than your average civilian office worker.

This is painful to read. So much misogynistic pseudoscience it’s crazy. Please re-read all of sgt smudges posts and they eloquently and concisely layout why your arguments are so weak.

Are we really back to making up numbers to justify a position?

I'm not even sure what are the positions to be honest.

I mean we know for a fact female guardsmen are a thing and all female IG Regiment are a thing.

Are female guardsmen less common than male ones? Probably, but less common when dealing with the IoM likely still means trillions upon trillions of female guardsmen.

And when it comes to famous IG worlds in which their whole thing is producing guardsmen regiments then I expect a pretty even 50/50 split.

It's just blatant sexism disguised as pseudoscience at this point.
There is no actual discussion about the 40k background.

Also? On Arbites?

As products of the Schola Progenia? Adeptus Arbites are well trained, well exercised and well fed.

Planetary Police Forces however are not Adeptus Arbites. Sure, in-universe visitors to Planets may use Arbites as a catch all term, but a Chicken doesn’t become a Turkey just because you call it one,

Those Planetary Police Forces will wildly vary. Some are just Bobbies On The Beat. And may in fact be Fat Sweaty Coppers. Others, such as the Palanite Enforcers of Necromunda are much closer to a Paramilitary force, again decently trained, fed and equipped, the result of carefully selected candidates - including already experience Gangers.

In short? There is no set standard, planet to planet.

Removed - rule #1

Hi, going to ask this once, as this thread is generating a lot of reports from BOTH sides of the argument here.. be polite, stay on topic or if it keeps generating reports, we'll lock it.

How much do the physical difference matter in 40k?

It’s a universe where suspensors are not exactly uncommon. So lugging heavy gear around can be mitigated.

The guard tends to deploy en mass. So if there is entrenching to do, how much is done by troopers, or how much help can they get from things like servitors or other attached dedicated help?

The Guard goes to war on an industrial scale.

Another thing to consider is expected foes. Remember the guard are well fed, trained, and equipped compared to most human troops they are expected to fight (rebels, cultists, traitor PDFs) This will help even out any raw disparity in abilities. It’s easy to forget in the over the top world of 40k, where every unit is more elite then the last, that the humble guardsmen is actually not a slouch. They just live in a universe full of things way more nasty.

The most common xenos opponent is going to be an ork, who is going to tear through guardsmen and guardswomen in CC regardless of gender. Same could be said for most other alien races out there. What humanity brings to the table is logistics and numbers. We can’t take anything out there in a fist fight, but there are a lot of us, with reliable guns, standing shoulder to shoulder.

For that we need to maximize our recruitment pool. This is not a volunteer army where we choose the best of the best. It’s conscripted masses, where every warm body is needed on the line.

In older lore (not sure if it’s still valid) children of the regiment would be trained up to join it as whiteshields. And after a successful campaign, the guard would settle on the planet and become the new nobility/ruling class/garrison. For that, you would want a mixed regiment, as you are basically colonizing a planet and would want some gals from home instead of just the guys. And they can fight and win their new world well enough beside the menfolk.

 Nevelon wrote:
How much do the physical difference matter in 40k?

It’s a universe where suspensors are not exactly uncommon. So lugging heavy gear around can be mitigated.

The guard tends to deploy en mass. So if there is entrenching to do, how much is done by troopers, or how much help can they get from things like servitors or other attached dedicated help?

The Guard goes to war on an industrial scale.

Another thing to consider is expected foes. Remember the guard are well fed, trained, and equipped compared to most human troops they are expected to fight (rebels, cultists, traitor PDFs) This will help even out any raw disparity in abilities. It’s easy to forget in the over the top world of 40k, where every unit is more elite then the last, that the humble guardsmen is actually not a slouch. They just live in a universe full of things way more nasty.

The most common xenos opponent is going to be an ork, who is going to tear through guardsmen and guardswomen in CC regardless of gender. Same could be said for most other alien races out there. What humanity brings to the table is logistics and numbers. We can’t take anything out there in a fist fight, but there are a lot of us, with reliable guns, standing shoulder to shoulder.

For that we need to maximize our recruitment pool. This is not a volunteer army where we choose the best of the best. It’s conscripted masses, where every warm body is needed on the line.

In older lore (not sure if it’s still valid) children of the regiment would be trained up to join it as whiteshields. And after a successful campaign, the guard would settle on the planet and become the new nobility/ruling class/garrison. For that, you would want a mixed regiment, as you are basically colonizing a planet and would want some gals from home instead of just the guys. And they can fight and win their new world well enough beside the menfolk.

This is a good point, the whole boys are stronger/faster etc than girls argument becomes completely irrelevant in the 41st millennium. Even other human foes are juiced up on chaos devotion, most stuff you’ll fight is the stuff of nightmares. Even the strongest fittest humans is outmatched.

The thing with this discussion where it becomes toxic is the fact that people are happy to use real world justifications, which are clouded by real world prejudice but will ignore the in setting reality that flies against their argument altogether.

In universe mass conscription of both male and female population makes complete sense due to the total war of the setting. To ignore that only adds to the toxic feel of the community. The fact that the creators and owners of the setting are actively trying to increase inclusion in the background and models should be a clear signal the direction we are going. Female guard aren’t new, they are only recently getting models but have been around for ages in the fluff.

We should be encouraging as many people as possible to get involved with the hobby, gate keeping and and trying to discourage inclusion is not acceptable. I know the mods have received complaints from both “sides” but I feel it is a duty of anyone to call out and challenge gate keeping and the kind of misogyny we’ve seen in this thread. If we don’t then the community will never improve.

I showed this thread to my 12 year old daughter and she was appalled at the arguments in here. We really need to do better.

Yeah. Respectfully, it kind of feels like the "women would be way less common" camp are using iffy real-world arguments rooted in biased cultures to go out of their way to justify a large gender gap. Like, we really can't confirm any hard percentages here, and I wouldn't be surprised if there was a gender gap. But I also wouldn't be surprised if male/female split was basically 50/50. The arguments being used to insist that the unknown gender gap (if any) is large feel like they're stretching and come across as kind of cringe.

"Woman don't join the guard as often because they're too busy making babies. And then obviously they're the ones who raise the kids."

In the grim dark future of the 41st millenium, it feels really odd to assume that women are so busy making babies, so unable to do something to address that pregnancy, and so commonly assumed to be responsible for child-rearing that it results in a galaxy-wide gender gap in the guard.

You could still have fairly even representation of named characters in books and still have only 20-30% of all IG be women. Disproportional representation because GW wants more female representation to boost sales/popularity/cultural brownie points.

But again, you don't want to just count named characters. The nameless mooks in the background count too, and I would bet that most of them be dudes in the GW artwork or various novels, even the new stuff. GW is just making an effort to ensure that more of them are women, for diversity and not because it would necessarily make sense in the setting.

Not trying to call you out or anything, but you're literally saying that we should assume the representation shown in novels can't be representative of the wider setting. Like, you're using your assumption that you're right about the gender gap as a reason to ignore evidence that contradicts your belief that there's a large gender gap. Isn't that an overt example of begging the question?

This comes across as you wanting there to be a gender gap, so you're rejecting evidence that there isn't one on the basis that it doesn't support your argument. To oversimplify and paraphrase your argument:

"Based on the closest thing we have to first-hand sources from the setting, it seems like women and men are roughly equally represented in most millitary structures in the imperium."
"Those sources are automatically invalid because a small gender gap would be more appealing to real-world audiences."

Like, people have pointed out that real-world cultural factors wouldn't necessarily apply because cultures in the 41st millenium are so vastly different from the real-world. People have pointed out that biological factors would likely be moot or of limited relevance. (Can't outpunch an ork regardless of sex. Can meet physical fitness standards regardless of sex. The guard probably isn't concerned enough about your long-term health to care whether or not you're prone to stress injuries.) At this point, it feels like the only reason to assume that cultural or biological factors "must be" significant enough to result in a large gender gap is that you already want that to be true going into the discussion. Or rather, that you thought about it a bit, decided it was probably true, and are perhaps digging your heels in a bit to avoid changing your minds?

Grey Templar wrote:

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:

Grey Templar wrote:Your chainsword analogy is dumb. Here is why.

The chainsword works in the setting, chainsaws would be terrible weapons IRL. The contradition is covered by "space technology/magic". Same with gravity. Gravity is the same, but technology has allowed for the cheating of gravity.

Aka, you can ignore logic when you want to. Why one, and not the other? Explain to me how technology has allowed for the cheating of gravity, using IRL logic.

I don't know how the Imperium's technology cheats gravity, it is obviously fictional. But it is patently clear that the Imperium has anti-grav technology(hover tanks and bikes and such).

So, you're suggesting that Titans use anti-grav tech? Where? I don't see it.

That sounds like you're taking something we know to exist, and retroactively applying pseudoscience to handwave its discrepancy from our own world. Interesting. How is that any different from taking the all-women regiments and mass employment of women within the Imperial Guard as something we know to exist, and retroactively applying a logic to it that could handwave its discrepancy from our own world?

Sounds like you're making a very arbitrary distinction there, and exactly what I mean by you handwaving the breaking of IRL physics and logic in 40k for some things, but not others.

This tells us that human biology is the root cause of society gender roles. Therefore, as long as humans have the current biological forms that we do it is going to cause our societies to develop along these lines. And if and when that happens, the creatures living that way won't truly be human anymore.

Since humans in 40k still look and seem to act identical to modern day humans, there is no reason to belive that anything in this regard has changed.

You know, I could be wrong, but people have historically used those sorts of "human biology says that our cultures MUST do this" argument to defend some VERY sketchy stuff, like slavery.

I don't think that you really believe in that, do you? That a sketchy understanding of biology (and a willingness to overlook the cases where this hasn't been the case) must dictate our cultures in a way that reinforces the current dominant cultures of our time? Because that would be very much unscientific and would go against practically everything many sociologists and cultural scholars are currently arguing.

AldarionTelcontar wrote:

 Nevelon wrote:
Even if you have standards where men are going to out perform women, how high is the bar? If the average man is at 6, and the average woman is at 5, does it mater if the guard only needs you at 3?

Sure, they would prefer an army full of 10s, but they get what they get and use them.

Welcome to the guard, here is your lasgun and flack vest. Go die for the Imperium.

Problem is that average woman is lot lower than 5, and Guard (generally) needs you at lot higher than 6.

Do you have sources for ANY of this, or are you just making up numbers?

And sure, you don't need much physical strength to fight when you have a lasgun.

Congratulations, you realised why all this posturing about male bodies being strong is completely unnecessary.

Man will still have far denser bones, thus significantly improving resistance to injury. And I don't mean just "breaking a bone", but also cumulative injuries under effort. It also means that said bones are better at protecting internal organs from injury - and that matters, because armor can only dissipate force, not cancel it outright (until you get into stuff like forcefields, which is no longer armor).

I'm sure all those bones will protect you from flesh-burrowing parasites, supercharged lasers, rocket propelled grenades, and weapons that atomise you. /s

The differences are frankly MINISCULE and wouldn't even be considered by recruitment. And we know this, because 1. We see women in the guard. 2. We see conscripts in the guard, literally used as cannon fodder. 3. There's plenty of regiments which recruit from pretty slight populations - Salvar-Chem Dogs and Tanith, etc.

Wyldhunt wrote:Yeah. Respectfully, it kind of feels like the "women would be way less common" camp are using iffy real-world arguments rooted in biased cultures to go out of their way to justify a large gender gap. Like, we really can't confirm any hard percentages here, and I wouldn't be surprised if there was a gender gap. But I also wouldn't be surprised if male/female split was basically 50/50. The arguments being used to insist that the unknown gender gap (if any) is large feel like they're stretching and come across as kind of cringe.

Absolutely true. The facts of the setting simply *do not match* the super biased and frankly misleading arguments being raised about the real world, as well as not really reflecting the malleability of culture and the bodies within it. The whole thing reads as incredibly myopic.

You're literally saying that we should assume the representation shown in novels can't be representative of the wider setting. Like, you're using your assumption that you're right about the gender gap as a reason to ignore evidence that contradicts your belief that there's a large gender gap. Isn't that an overt example of begging the question?

This comes across as you wanting there to be a gender gap, so you're rejecting evidence that there isn't one on the basis that it doesn't support your argument. To oversimplify and paraphrase your argument:

"Based on the closest thing we have to first-hand sources from the setting, it seems like women and men are roughly equally represented in most millitary structures in the imperium."
"Those sources are automatically invalid because a small gender gap would be more appealing to real-world audiences."

Exactly. I feel like none of the arguments being made on that front are really addressing how we see plenty of women in the Guard, and that this point here about "well, that's just GW pandering and over-representing their world" is a great example of admitting that you don't really care about what GW have said and shown, you just want to believe in your own real-world logic.

At this point, it feels like the only reason to assume that cultural or biological factors "must be" significant enough to result in a large gender gap is that you already want that to be true going into the discussion. Or rather, that you thought about it a bit, decided it was probably true, and are perhaps digging your heels in a bit to avoid changing your minds?

This also feels very true. And I'd like if people could open their minds up to the idea just a bit more.

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:
Exactly. I feel like none of the arguments being made on that front are really addressing how we see plenty of women in the Guard, and that this point here about "well, that's just GW pandering and over-representing their world" is a great example of admitting that you don't really care about what GW have said and shown, you just want to believe in your own real-world logic.

Conversely, there hasn't been anything presented to support any particular ratio of men/women in the Guard.


For example the vast majority of the model range is male, the vast majority of the artwork depicts males, the great majority of fiction features guardsmen rather than guardswomen. In the absence of GW having said anything specific, what they've shown could reasonably be taken to suggest a majority male make-up.


It's all very well to accuse people of wanting to believe their real world logic; but that's completely hollow when no more concrete evidence has been presented to support gender equal recruiting. It looks a lot like picking a side based not on any evidence, but on feels.

Before somebody accuses me of hating women or something, I don't particularly care either way (beyond thinking that separate male and female regiments being more common than mixed regiments makes far more sense to me, as they would be easier to resupply), but I'm not going to pick a side without any actual evidence.

 Lord Damocles wrote:

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:
Exactly. I feel like none of the arguments being made on that front are really addressing how we see plenty of women in the Guard, and that this point here about "well, that's just GW pandering and over-representing their world" is a great example of admitting that you don't really care about what GW have said and shown, you just want to believe in your own real-world logic.

Conversely, there hasn't been anything presented to support any particular ratio of men/women in the Guard.


For example the vast majority of the model range is male, the vast majority of the artwork depicts males, the great majority of fiction features guardsmen rather than guardswomen. In the absence of GW having said anything specific, what they've shown could reasonably be taken to suggest a majority male make-up.


It's all very well to accuse people of wanting to believe their real world logic; but that's completely hollow when no more concrete evidence has been presented to support gender equal recruiting. It looks a lot like picking a side based not on any evidence, but on feels.

Before somebody accuses me of hating women or something, I don't particularly care either way (beyond thinking that separate male and female regiments being more common than mixed regiments makes far more sense to me, as they would be easier to resupply), but I'm not going to pick a side without any actual evidence.

You're not wrong. But I'd say one side is saying: female guard should be in the low digits, maximum 30% because *women in our world are really weak and could never be any different or it would break the laws of biology or at least my immersion*
While the other side argues: from what we know about the setting 50% women are possible.

Sgt. Cortez wrote:

 Lord Damocles wrote:

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:
Exactly. I feel like none of the arguments being made on that front are really addressing how we see plenty of women in the Guard, and that this point here about "well, that's just GW pandering and over-representing their world" is a great example of admitting that you don't really care about what GW have said and shown, you just want to believe in your own real-world logic.

Conversely, there hasn't been anything presented to support any particular ratio of men/women in the Guard.


For example the vast majority of the model range is male, the vast majority of the artwork depicts males, the great majority of fiction features guardsmen rather than guardswomen. In the absence of GW having said anything specific, what they've shown could reasonably be taken to suggest a majority male make-up.


It's all very well to accuse people of wanting to believe their real world logic; but that's completely hollow when no more concrete evidence has been presented to support gender equal recruiting. It looks a lot like picking a side based not on any evidence, but on feels.

Before somebody accuses me of hating women or something, I don't particularly care either way (beyond thinking that separate male and female regiments being more common than mixed regiments makes far more sense to me, as they would be easier to resupply), but I'm not going to pick a side without any actual evidence.

You're not wrong. But I'd say one side is saying: female guard should be in the low digits, maximum 30% because *women in our world are really weak and could never be any different or it would break the laws of biology or at least my immersion*
While the other side argues: from what we know about the setting 50% women are possible.

Yeah, pretty much this. I can't give you a confident, specific number for what percentage of the guard are women. However, I also don't think we have enough evidence to confidently say that the percentage is especially low (<= 30% as someone suggested.) So it's less that I'm arguing for near 50% representation and more that I'm arguing against "but women have to make and raise babies" and "but women are so bad at arm wrestling though" as compelling evidence for someone to assert especially low representation.

* The fact that the imperium wants to be able to churn out a lot of soldiers suggests that they should be systemically predisposed towards accepting as many recruits as they can get. If sex isn't an absolute deal breaker, they're not going to go around discouraging half their recruiting pool from joining.
* As previously mentioned, I haven't counted up named characters from novels, but it seems like we see a pretty even split between men and women in at least most imperial military branches if not the guard itself. Especially in higher ranks or relatively "elite" roles (because those are the characters stories tend to focus on.) So unless someone wants to make the case that the imperium of man is actively trying to push women into high-ranking positions rather than promoting those characters to their ranks due to their abilities...
* Orks don't particularly care how much a puny human can benchpress. So any sexually dimorphic differences in average strength seem irrelevant. And has been pointed out, there are whole worlds known for having relatively scrawny populations that can apparently meet the minimum guard requirements just fine.

Those bullet points aren't enough for me to confidently say that women constitute 45% of the imperial guard, or whatever, but they do make me dubious there would be something like a 2:1 male:female ratio.

We also have first hand source in the form of Commissar Cain that all lady regiments are nothing remarkable. Whilst he’s not exactly a galactic authority, that’s still an informative view.

Inquisitor Vail likewise finds absolutely nothing noteworthy in women serving in the Guard. Again, whilst she’s not going to have absolute knowledge, as an Inquisitor she’ll naturally have a greater experience than Cain, so that’s a second informative first hand opinion.

Though it is worth noting they both consider Lady General Jena Sulit to the first Lady General, other sources show that to be incorrect.

Also also? Cain’s parents were apparently killed by Kroot whilst on active duty in the Guard, hence he was raised in the Schola Progenium, as that’s where the orphans of Imperial Officers tend to be sent.

That in itself is an informative status quo. After all, you’re not an orphan if only your Dad is dead, anymore than I’m an orphan because my Mum passed away.

So for that many orphans? Enough to support multiple branches of the military? Men and Women serving must be pretty common place, no?

Also when it comes to the model range its insanely limited compared to the reality of the setting. Just consider that most of the Guard we have is Cadian; with one or two specialist units represented by one box of models.

Whilst in the setting there are thousands of different regiments; each with their own uniforms, equipment, styles of battle. Even generic things like the Leman Russ would differ between different Forgeworlds and regiments (still keeping within set designs established millennia ago of course).

The model range is bonkers tiny compared to the reality of the setting. So sure the male-female ratio is very stark in the model range; but the model range also only really depicts 1 force from 1 world. That doesn't suddenly invalidate all the other in-lore regiments from existing. It just means its the domain of custom work or imagination because GW can't make thousands of different regiments

Minor side note: Gaunts Ghosts are also a mixed regiment, at least after the inclusion of the Vergastines. And if my memory doesn't betray me there where never any mentions that the ladies had problems performing on the level necessary for duty. A significant proportion of them where hard of hearing or deaf and could still serve...

@ General topic: while my first few posts argued in the direction that sending of just the men makes sense under the assumption that tithes happen so often and to such a high degree that they make a non-neglectible dent in the population in reproductive age on a planet I have to say the arguments brought up by numerous posters here have convinced me otherwise. The sheer scale of the imperial population paired with the option of sending a couple of million (or even billion) new settlers from one of the overcrowded hive worlds should any one planet really get in trouble with its population numbers should make this a moot point in all but the most extremely isolated scenarios.

And I agree that given the tech available to the Guard (lasguns, tanks etc.) and the expected enemies that smash the humble guards(wo)man anyway if they close the distance, conscripting just or preferably men does not seem that logical, to me at least.

ah yes, let nonsense be the enemy of reason for the boon of ideals not bound by reality of the Story.

What you are once again repeatedly conveniently forgetting is a setting with a natural material universe, in a galaxy with a mode of transportation that has questionable performance between isolated places in a vast emptyness making every single planet rather isolated.

Not universally.

There absolutely are stable Warp Routes. Worlds which are at a nexus of multiple Warp Routes usually become Bastion Worlds as way to secure those for The Imperium, and to act as a central hub for military operations across the planets and systems of those stable routes.

Now, some worlds will be routes wise on the arse end of nowhere. And because of how the warp doesn’t give a fig about realspace distances, that doesn’t require the isolated world to be far flung. It could be the next habitable star system over, but if the Warp Currents are on the wonk around it, you’re still going to be isolated, because non-warp based interstellar travel just isn’t gonna happen.

But even then, thanks to the tech available to the Imperium as a whole, provided a system has one Earth-like world (or made one that way during the Golden Age), the moons and planets of that system are very likely to have some kind of populace scurrying about. This includes planetoids and asteroid mining, orbital dockyards etc.

A cursory Google shows right now, Earth has an estimated 2.3 billion humans aged 20-39. Or around 29.9% of our total population. With another 2.6 billion aged 0-19, or 32.2%.

Because a billion is a frankly staggering number? You can still ship 1,000,000 off world each year, every year, and not dent the population at all. Because those that are left are still gonna human, and makes more humans. It’s something our species is really, really good at.

And remember your tithe is linked to your overall population, resources, specialisation and tech base. It’s not a one size fits all approach.

An Agri-world for instance may have no manpower tithe to the Guard whatsoever, because being of typically (and comparatively) low population density and heavily automated, you need to keep that population where it is. The tithe there will be foodstuffs, and perhaps some PDF, possibly a small number of bodies to the Guard.

A Hive World will have a dramatically higher tithe. Its population will run well into the billions. And its manufactorums can churn out prodigious quantities of basic firearms and fighting vehicles. Even so, across the world you could probably recruit 10,000,000 Guardsmen a month and nobody is going to notice. At all. And they’ll still be popping out sprogs at a similarly prodigious rate. Indeed, meeting such a tithe may be part of the overall balancing act of managing such a planet.

Most Hive Worlds have a population massively in excess of what it can support alone. So shipping several million warm bodies off to the Guard each year helps manage that somewhat.

And hey. A life in the Guard, from a civvies point of view means regular rations, regular water, and an alternative to the drudgery of a life working in the manufactorums.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
* Orks don't particularly care how much a puny human can benchpress. So any sexually dimorphic differences in average strength seem irrelevant.

I think that's overly reductive- there's a lot more that muscle and size matter for than how hard can you punch. It's not like modern-day soldiers bench press so they can best fight in hand to hand combat, but there's still a push towards physical strength to handle all the other demands of soldiering. Gear is heavy. Guns are heavy. The bigger you are, the easier it is to handle recoil, and to manipulate a 10+lb weapon system (let alone haul a 30lb machine gun and employ it effectively). Digging ditches and stacking sandbags are physically intensive tasks. Operating a tank is more demanding than people think. The Guard is not a 'hit the big red button while drinking coffee' military force.

But sexual dimorphism is two overlapping bell curves, not mutual exclusion. It's not an excuse or justification for an all-male army. It just means we might expect to see more female pilots and more male cannon loaders.

And really, I think the politics of the world supplying a regiment probably matter more. A planet that drafts by lottery is not going to have any gender bias. A planet that uses physical trials for recruitment will send off regiments of musclemen. A planet that selects for more representative soldiering ability will be mixed-sex. A planet that is struggling to meet its tithe will send whoever it can get. A planet with a patriarchal or matriarchal tradition of governance will probably be overtly sexist in its recruitment one way or the other, to the detriment of its troop quality. A planet in a state of total war may favor sending its men off to fight- loss of genetic diversity in the next generation being preferable to demographic collapse.

The Imperium is a vast, dysfunctional bureaucracy of a million fiefdoms with their own priorities and values that dictate Guard recruitment. Also, it's a fictional entity with no hard numbers given about its demographic makeup- I don't really see a point in speculating about specifics; we know that all-male, all-female, and mixed-sex regiments exist. You don't need census tables to justify Your Dudes.

I’m not sure Guard equipment is all that heavy?

Certainly the Lasgun is assembled from metal and plastic. Its ammo is going to be markedly lighter than bullets, being essentially a battery pack. Also, no recoil on your Lasgun, Pistol or Cannon.

Heavy Weapon Teams are splitting the labour. Dedicated Gunner and Loader for shooty bit. But moving it and setting it up? The burden is shared.

And we don’t tend to see the models carrying large backpacks or anything on the regular.

Only War puts the M36 Lasgun at 4KG.

For reference, the C7A2 used by the Canadian Forces is 4.58KG with a scope and a full mag. The scope adds about 700G to the weight, so both weapons should weight relatively the same when the Lasgun gets its own external attachment.

Furthermore, there's a saying that nowadays soldiers carry more lighter gear than before, in that while gear is lighter (and less bulky) than it was, it just means they carry more of it and thus don't really carry less weight.

As for Heavy Weapons, well, there's a shared burden, but it's still quite the burden, even for something as ''light'' as the GPMG you're looking at one guy carrying the actual gun (11,6KG plus however many bullets in a sling you wanna keep on the gun), and some ammo, and the other carries the greater portion of the ammo as well as at least a spare barrel. Add a tripod that's about the weight of the gun if you're going to entrench somewhere, and a C7 for the assistant gunner, it adds quite a lot.

 catbarf wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
* Orks don't particularly care how much a puny human can benchpress. So any sexually dimorphic differences in average strength seem irrelevant.

I think that's overly reductive- there's a lot more that muscle and size matter for than how hard can you punch. It's not like modern-day soldiers bench press so they can best fight in hand to hand combat, but there's still a push towards physical strength to handle all the other demands of soldiering. Gear is heavy. Guns are heavy. The bigger you are, the easier it is to handle recoil, and to manipulate a 10+lb weapon system (let alone haul a 30lb machine gun and employ it effectively). Digging ditches and stacking sandbags are physically intensive tasks. Operating a tank is more demanding than people think. The Guard is not a 'hit the big red button while drinking coffee' military force.

I was definitely being intentionally reductive there. I still stand by my point though. Whatever the physical demands of the guard may be, I'd be surprised to find that those demands are actively preventing a significant number of women from joining up. Maybe women get prioritized for tank duty. Maybe women just dig trenches and carry around lasguns well enough for it not to matter.

The Imperium is a vast, dysfunctional bureaucracy of a million fiefdoms with their own priorities and values that dictate Guard recruitment. Also, it's a fictional entity with no hard numbers given about its demographic makeup- I don't really see a point in speculating about specifics; we know that all-male, all-female, and mixed-sex regiments exist. You don't need census tables to justify Your Dudes.

See, I'm fine with saying we simply don't know hard numbers. I'm fine with saying that some worlds will have a gender bias for their guard tithes. I guess I'm just less okay with people trying to make firm assertions about the topic using the physical and cultural norms of real-world modern day Earth as evidence.

It kind of comes across like, "We can't possibly know specifics about the sex statistics of the imperial guard. But what we can say for sure is that there aren't a lot of women because those noodle-armed baby factories are too busy raising the kids."

Sgt. Cortez wrote:

 Lord Damocles wrote:

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:
Exactly. I feel like none of the arguments being made on that front are really addressing how we see plenty of women in the Guard, and that this point here about "well, that's just GW pandering and over-representing their world" is a great example of admitting that you don't really care about what GW have said and shown, you just want to believe in your own real-world logic.

Conversely, there hasn't been anything presented to support any particular ratio of men/women in the Guard.


For example the vast majority of the model range is male, the vast majority of the artwork depicts males, the great majority of fiction features guardsmen rather than guardswomen. In the absence of GW having said anything specific, what they've shown could reasonably be taken to suggest a majority male make-up.


It's all very well to accuse people of wanting to believe their real world logic; but that's completely hollow when no more concrete evidence has been presented to support gender equal recruiting. It looks a lot like picking a side based not on any evidence, but on feels.

Before somebody accuses me of hating women or something, I don't particularly care either way (beyond thinking that separate male and female regiments being more common than mixed regiments makes far more sense to me, as they would be easier to resupply), but I'm not going to pick a side without any actual evidence.

You're not wrong. But I'd say one side is saying: female guard should be in the low digits, maximum 30% because *women in our world are really weak and could never be any different or it would break the laws of biology or at least my immersion*
While the other side argues: from what we know about the setting 50% women are possible.

That isn't the argument at all and is a dishonest simplification of it.

The argument is that the biological situation with women means that women are less likely to end up in the IG then men. Both because of women choosing not to enter the IG due to family obligations(IRL a man with a family is more likely to volunteer than a women with a family. There is zero reason to think the reasons for that are different in 40k) and also taking advantage of exceptions when people are getting drafted.

Admittedly, there is no direct evidence that the Imperium has exceptions when they start drafting people. However, logic dictates that there must always be exceptions to conscription orders at least as a general rule because otherwise they would be utterly impossible and ineffective for the Imperium. Even when you are desperate enough to draft people by force, it doesn't mean you're going to take literally anybody and everybody. That would result in far too many people you don't want in the military. Sick, majorly disabled, skilled laborers, people working vital jobs, people who are the sole providers for their families(who by taking means that you've just generated at best a bunch of people the state now needs to provide for and at worst a bunch of new criminals), etc... You'd only have a no exceptions draft if your planet is being actively overrun by heretics or xenos or whatever at which point all bets are off.

For these reasons, it is entirely logical that the Imperium would still allow for exceptions to draft notices(requiring proof of course). These exceptions would logically include having children/being pregnant, etc... This would generate a few exceptions that men couldn't benefit from/would be less able to benefit from. IE: if a family has both parents get drafted, one of them can get out of it. The women is more likely to be the one to get out of it, be it because the man volunteers to be the one who goes or if its simply policy that if a women gets drafted she is ineligible if there are kids.

Yes, this assumes that most of the Imperium still has a culture where it is primarily women who take care of the children. Unless we have direct evidence that says its not the case however this should be our default since that is what the past and present tells us happens.

Finally, when we only consider people voluntarily joining the IG, again based on the real world, women are just less likely to volunteer. Why this is the case is not entirely clear and we could go on forever trying to find out, but it is a clear trend in the real world among all volunteer militaries. Women just so rarely volunteer for the army compared to men. They just don't want or feel compelled to join. And again, we have no reason to believe that this has changed in 40k. You could come up with specific worlds where this isn't the case, but they'd be an exception.

This could easily result in an IG with women being only 20-30% of its total population. Now, some people might think that "only 30%" is small. Its really not. That is still a huge % compared to modern day where only a couple countries approach that. And honestly it is probably the 'best' you can possibly get given how this seems to work IRL. There are inherent effects that biology has on women and their decision making regarding them joining the military which for whatever reason lowers their likelihood of joining the army.

None of this prevents the women who do choose to join the armed forces from performing well or anything like that. It just means there aren't as many women in the armed forces, and by logical extrapolation the IG. This isn't a good or a bad thing. Its just a thing. Nobody should get offended by this.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Wyldhunt wrote:

It kind of comes across like, "We can't possibly know specifics about the sex statistics of the imperial guard. But what we can say for sure is that there aren't a lot of women because those noodle-armed baby factories are too busy raising the kids."

Only if you are being dishonest. The argument is that the women who are doing X won't be doing Y. Which will naturally depress the ratio of people who are doing Y.

And given the Imperium's ample population, women are obviously still making a lot of children in the 41st millenium and I don't see any attempts by the Imperium to control this. If anything, the Imperium simply chooses to leverage its effectively unlimited population.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

It kind of comes across like, "We can't possibly know specifics about the sex statistics of the imperial guard. But what we can say for sure is that there aren't a lot of women because those noodle-armed baby factories are too busy raising the kids."

I'm sure your argument could be as easily dismissed by claiming that it comes across like, 'We can't possibly know specifics about the sex statistics of the Imperial Guard. But what we can say for sure is that there are a lot of women because nobody cares if those weaklings get killed by superior enemies, and maybe equipment is lighter in the future or something so it doesn't matter that the men are stronger'.

 Grey Templar wrote:
[...]
Finally, when we only consider people voluntarily joining the IG, again based on the real world, women are just less likely to volunteer. [...]

One interesting question here is, as someone mentioned earlier: life in the imperium oftentimes REAALLLLY sucks. And while there are several regions on todays earth where volunteering is rare, there are others were it is more common, especially when being in the military means you at least get some food and water. Then one has to consider that some of those regions, where serving in the military is a possible escape from poverty, don't allow or at least heavily restrict women serving in the military. Even before any performance tests are made.

My point basically is: if we would live in a grimdark dystopia and the option to join the guard is there for both sexes, it might be a lot more desirable for women then we see on todays earth. Tona Creed in the Gaunts Ghosts Novels come to mind, as do the Vergastine militia women. They were in a battle zone against an enemy that did not care that they are women. So one might as well have a gun than just lay down and die.

Regarding standards and conscription: as someone who was amongst the last cohorts being conscripted around here: the entry bar for that was really low in Germany at least. Sure there was some stuff that got you disqualified, mostly old injuries or preconditions that might turn worse when serving, forcing the state to pay for the former conscript which is not really an issue in WH40k. But on the whole I saw several young men being conscripted that... well lets just say that the system wasn't particularly picky. You could be short, fat, have bad eysight, bad hearing, allergic... Would they have had a general draft of both sexes back then, they would definitly have taken at least some women.

 Lord Damocles wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:

It kind of comes across like, "We can't possibly know specifics about the sex statistics of the imperial guard. But what we can say for sure is that there aren't a lot of women because those noodle-armed baby factories are too busy raising the kids."

I'm sure your argument could be as easily dismissed by claiming that it comes across like, 'We can't possibly know specifics about the sex statistics of the Imperial Guard. But what we can say for sure is that there are a lot of women because nobody cares if those weaklings get killed by superior enemies, and maybe equipment is lighter in the future or something so it doesn't matter that the men are stronger'.

I mean, I know you're trying to make that sound hyperbolic, but the imperium probably doesn't expect you to win melee against orks regardless of sex, nor does it probably care how much extra gear you can carry so long as you can carry whatever the required kit is. The exact weight of which, to my knowledge, is unknown. I'd assume it probably varies from regiment to regiment and would thus probably be a weight that takes their recruiting pool into consideration.

The big difference here, I think, is that I'm not trying to assert a 50/50 split between men and women. I'm just rejecting other arguments that try to assert something like a 30/70 split.

My thought process is something like this:
The imperium wants bodies. It gets bodies, in part, by getting people to sign up for the guard. The more people it convinces to sign up, the easier it is to get the bodies it wants. So the starting point here is that the imperium, valuing bodies regardless of rude bits provide those bodies can meet the baseline requirements for soldiering, doesn't care about the sex of its recruits. Men and women both being welcomed as recruits is the default unless there's a compelling reason for one to be more welcome than the other. The main arguments presented for why men might be more welcomed so far seem to be:

* Cultural norms. I.e. women are seen as/encouraged to be caretakers resulting in a significant cultural bias against women becoming soldiers. However, I'm not aware of any evidence that supports the idea that this is the norm in the 41st millenium. It's true in the modern United States because we're only a couple generations removed from women not being allowed to vote, access their own bank accounts, 90s and early 2000s sitcom men get butthurt over their love interests being perceived as tougher than them, etc. But in a setting that has had 38,000+ years to change its paradigm, with a huge part of that time being spent in dire circumstances where aliens and demons are attacking and you can't be picky about who does the fighting... It makes more sense for there to NOT be a taboo against women warriors, nor does it make a lot of sense that women would be expected to be caretakers to a greater degree than men. For these reasons, the cultural norms argument doesn't hold up for me.

* Physical differences (especially in terms of physical strength.) The case here seems to be that being male means that, on average, you'll be a more desirable overall soldier due to your, on average, higher strength. Specific examples have included being able to carry your gear, dig trenches, and avoid stress injuries. As has been discussed, it seems likely that the imperium is generally just happy to have bodies. No one is particularly interested in how much you're exceeding the minimum requirements by; only that you meet the minimum requirements. Those minimum requirements don't seem to be especially demanding (see: men with leaner builds from some worlds being able to soldier perfectly well, possibly out of shape arbites being a thing, etc.), so it doesn't seem like this would be a deterrant for the women that are making the cut to join the guard. And concern about injuries resulting from long-term physical stress suggests that the imperium is expecting a large number of guardsmen to survive long enough in combat situations for such injuries to matter, which strikes me as kind of unlikely given the grim darkness and all. So unless we can find evidence that the minimum requirements for being a guardsman are beyond the abilities of an average female applicant, or unless we can find evidence that the imperial guard is reviewing stats/performances closely enough to care about physical strength in excess of the minimum requirements, this also seems like a weak argument.

So with neither of those arguments for women being less common than men in the guard being compelling, I'm left with the default position of assuming that the 'Guard is probably just happy to have bodies regardless of rude bits.

And that's without getting into hard-to-quantify evidence that there just... seem to be a decent number of women in the guard. In high ranks even which, given that only X% of your regiment is going to receive a higher rank, suggests that the number of women available to get promoted/assigned a higher rank is probably at least comparable to men.

tldr; the evidence for women being pretty common in the guard is that it makes sense the guard would be just as happy to accept women combined with the fact that there just... seem to be plenty of women. The argument for women being relatively rare is that the imperium of man, roughly 40,000 years in humanity's future, is still cleaving closely to societal norms that have been rapidly changing (at least in the United States) over the last century. Or that women will struggle with the physicality of the job despite us having plenty of examples of women in the 41st millenium not struggling with that sort of thing at all. (Be it due to the gear involved, the fact that humanity has such a huge population to pick from that they'll run out of openings before they run out of able-bodied women, or the requirements just not being all that demanding in the first place.)

Also regarding physical fitness: The Tanith Larkin is considered fit for service at above 60 years of age, with an amputated foot and a long history of psychological problems, hallucinations and migraines. And he was never particularly strong to begin with.

 Bobthehero wrote:
Only War puts the M36 Lasgun at 4KG.

For reference, the C7A2 used by the Canadian Forces is 4.58KG with a scope and a full mag. The scope adds about 700G to the weight, so both weapons should weight relatively the same when the Lasgun gets its own external attachment.

Furthermore, there's a saying that nowadays soldiers carry more lighter gear than before, in that while gear is lighter (and less bulky) than it was, it just means they carry more of it and thus don't really carry less weight.

As for Heavy Weapons, well, there's a shared burden, but it's still quite the burden, even for something as ''light'' as the GPMG you're looking at one guy carrying the actual gun (11,6KG plus however many bullets in a sling you wanna keep on the gun), and some ammo, and the other carries the greater portion of the ammo as well as at least a spare barrel. Add a tripod that's about the weight of the gun if you're going to entrench somewhere, and a C7 for the assistant gunner, it adds quite a lot.

Yeah, I think the argument about Imperial equipment being lighter is a non-starter and a distraction from the overall topic. Typically, militaries load as much equipment onto their soldiers as they can- this is sometimes limited by availability of equipment rather than weight, but the Imperial Guard usually fields well-equipped soldiers as default. If individual equipment is lighter, troopsrs will be issued more stuff.

IIRC, historically this has pretty consistently capped out at about 50kg for maximum sustainable human-carried load incl. clothes, armour, weapons, survival gear etc. I'd expect more variability for Imperial populations due to differing population genetics and environmental factors. Armageddon, for example, has lower gravity than Earth, so troopers tithed from there may have lighter loads on other worlds. The mechanisation of the Steel Legions probably offsets this somewhat.

Re. Guard models not typically wearing packs- I'd take this as assault or defensive loads for expected combat, with packs left at camp, rather than indicative of overall loads carried by the soldiers day-to-day. Troopers historically have done this for expected combat actions.