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Or it means that women understand better than men, that a degree in history doesn't tend to help you gain a decent paying job.

You saw that image I posted earlier education, art & performance, and psychology as being heavily, heavily female in the US? When you're comparing bachelors, history is, without a doubt, far better than all of those.

I do realize that you're making the point that data can be interpreted in a number of ways, just had to point out that there are worse choices and that lots of women seem to love those really, really, really bad choices.
 
You saw that image I posted earlier education, art & performance, and psychology as being heavily, heavily female in the US? When you're comparing bachelors, history is, without a doubt, far better than all of those.

I do realize that you're making the point that data can be interpreted in a number of ways, just had to point out that there are worse choices and that lots of women seem to love those really, really, really bad choices.
Median pay for a psychologist in the us 87K
Median pay for a HS teacher 56K
Post grad history guy that can't get hired on as a professor but still is teaching college classes...roughly minimum wage (I have a really good friend that falls into this category)
Now the interesting question is how many openings in teaching there are a year in the history field versus number of graduates.

As for art's and lit, same pay as a teacher if you're going into teaching
A&L has more teaching fields than History (English, Lit, Writing, Communication, theater...and quite a few more) so logic would dictate that there would be more teaching positions opening each year in A&L than history

Now the professions that can come out of Arts and Lit based on some quick checks
Newspaper, Periodical, Book, and Directory Publishers
Radio and Television Broadcasting
Other Information Services
Cable and Other Subscription Programming

Now the avg salary if employed might be lower with an A&L degree, but from my quick digging, it seems that there are far more employment opportunities within the field which to me, picking a degree that allows you to get a job...

Once you step out of positions that are specific to your degree, all else is going to be equal, a degree is a degree.

When you get to the top pay, out of A&L would be your actors and writers. How many in the history field make > 1,000,000? I'll give you a hint, it's far, far fewer than those that came from A&L.

So why is it you think a history degree is better than an A & L degree? To me it seems like a smarter choice.
 
Whenever I ask my women gamer friends why they don't play [exceptionally male dominated video game genre] their answer is always the same: The community, the community, the community. Very little, if any, consistent barriers exist over content or mechanics.

It's not just sexist jerks, who we can all acknowledge exist in some capacity, but also well meaning guys who nonetheless make them uncomfortable by responding to a womans' presence with disbelief, wonder, or pedestaling.

This thread has examples of both.
 
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Video gaming has been, and is still to some extent, male-dominated and considered a male activity. This increases the treshold for women to want to play them. The problem is lesser now than before but it still lingers, I dare speculate it may be even more so for strategy games due to stereotypical views on male vs. female penchant for logic, competition and such things - most of it is bull though.
But even if women do play video games a lot, and they do, they still have to deal with a male-dominated and often very sexist community (games themselves have a very bad track record on this) so the treshold for joining communities and thus being visible is higher (often you'll also find females passing as male to avoid any potential problems). If you had an omniscient polling tool I'm sure you'd find that a lot of women play strategy games; there's a discrepancy but not too much, and what discrepancy there is comes more from society telling us that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, not from any actual inclinations/skills/talents/capabilities inherent to a person's gender (or sex).
 
Whenever I ask my women gamer friends why they don't play [exceptionally male dominated video game genre] their answer is always the same: The community, the community, the community. Very little, if any, consistent barriers exist over content or mechanics.

It's not just sexist jerks, who we can all acknowledge exist in some capacity, but also well meaning guys who nonetheless make them uncomfortable by responding to a womans' presence with disbelief, wonder, or pedestaling.

This thread has examples of both.

Top post :).
 
Except, we're not women, and we have different brain chemistry. Assuming we know how we'd think if our brain chemistry was altered is perhaps a little optimistic ;).
Nice job answering to only the first 5 words of my post. 10/10 argumentation there.

Even so I very much disagree that this has to do with "brain chemistry", but rather the focus of Paradox games in general - that being warfare.
That is what I have mostly got as an answer to this kind of thing. It's not the mechanics of the game, it's what it's about.
 
Nice job answering to only the first 5 words of my post. 10/10 argumentation there.

Even so I very much disagree that this has to do with "brain chemistry", but rather the focus of Paradox games in general - that being warfare.
That is what I have mostly got as an answer to this kind of thing. It's not the mechanics of the game, it's what it's about.

Sorry, I didn't make myself clear enough. My point was that men and women have different brain chemistry, so the statement "If I was a woman I'd...." is based on shaky ground as we would think differently if we were women, due to the different brain chemistry. Ie, it's impossible to properly hypothesise how we would think if we were women without a much deeper understanding of the implications of the differences in brain chemistry than our species currently has. The rest of your post was based on the assumption that is was possible to have a "If I was a woman, I'd think like...." view, which I'd addressed as difficult to achieve given our current level of scientific understanding of brain chemistry, so didn't respond to the rest as the foundation of the rest of the post had been addressed and questioned. Definitely wasn't trying to be rude, and apologies for coming across as such :).

If I was a woman I'd have little interest in exploring the times when my kind were either non-actors in the game's theme topics or treated in a highly inferior manner.
While recent years have sparked more interest in female half of history fact just is that most of recorded history has been man stuff, especially the kind of thing Paradox games deal with.

Therefore I don't think it's just that men like war women like peace and so on, women play violent games all the same but I reckon they feel more at home in settings where they can identify with their character. I imagine science fiction to be more popular among women as a setting since our western future so far has a rather positive expectation of gender relations in the future.

Here's your original post again - apologies for not responding more thoroughly - I didn't, as the point that we can't think as women means that we're both basically hypothesising without a framework for testing whether we're sensibly making assumptions or talking out of various orifices :).

Pretending we can hypothesise as to how we would think if our brain chemistry as altered, I do think it's possible to have an interest in stuff that doesn't relate strictly to our identity, just as it's possible to identify with different identities more or less strongly. Sure, for a woman who only really identified with herself as a modern woman and isn't interested in anything that doesn't relate to her, looking at a historical game focussed on men might not hold any interest, but it's just as plausible someone could be a modern woman (or man) that identifies primarily as a French person (French identity being more important than gender identity) that takes an interest in women (or men) in Chinese history. While I agree many people's interests are tied closely to individual's identities, it is often the case that as people become more highly educated, gain a broader perspective and become more emotionally mature, they gain interests in things that are not strictly related to their identity (I enjoy playing PDS games with nations that are a long way distanced from the culture I originate from, and I've enjoyed playing as female characters in CK2 - this doesn't make me any less of a man that it would make a woman that enjoyed playing a male character in CK2).

I do know that males can think in a way that they can have an interest in something that isn't strictly related to their identity, and have seen plenty of anecdotal evidence that this is true of females as well, and the recent findings on the differences in brainchemistry suggest they may be better at this than males.

In terms of science fiction, I don't have any figures and haven't the foggiest where to get them from, so this is just a "pretty much statistically meaningless in-my-experience" thing, but I haven't noticed a distinctive difference between the male/female ratios in PDS' historical games and science-fiction grand strategy games.

In terms of the warfare focus, we both agree on that :). That said, without some proper survey work, it's an unfounded assumption.
 
Median pay for a psychologist in the us 87K
Median pay for a HS teacher 56K
Post grad history guy that can't get hired on as a professor but still is teaching college classes...roughly minimum wage (I have a really good friend that falls into this category)
Now the interesting question is how many openings in teaching there are a year in the history field versus number of graduates.

Well, the operative phrase in my post was "bachelor's degree"; once we get to post-graduate and doctoral level education, things change quite a bit. While you can teach with a bachelor's degree, the average teacher in the US has a master's and I can't imagine anyone setting up show as a psychologist or counselor with little more than a four-year degree. We also have to balance out the average and theoretical earnings with the rates of under-employment and unemployment in a given field; being the child of a former musician, who later became a six-figure earning producer, I would never risk going into the arts for any amount of potential reward. The odds are just that bad.

As for teaching positions, I'm not sure how other countries do it, but the American system has a lot of alternative certification set up so that people can leave other jobs and enter teaching. Once you get your pedagogy taken care of, you just take a few tests for the rest of your certifications; social sciences are usually treated as a class, so someone with a history degree could teach geography, economics, or government as well... or even any other subject so long as they pass the certification test for that area.

I'm not going to try and make the point that history is a field with amazing payment opportunities, because it isn't, I'm saying that as far as four-year degrees go, history isn't a degree that'll get your resume thrown out on sight. Furthermore, history and social science degrees tend to be well-rounded enough that you can easily branch into a different field when going off to pursue a post-graduate or doctoral degree; history, and the social sciences in general, are usually seen as good preliminaries for going on to law school.... yet another degree with high pay and far more qualified people than job opportunities.
 
Seems like one of those threads that could derail anytime, but here's my take :p I agree, most female gamers tend to not post much because they either don't care or get harassed easily. If you want a laugh, search xbox girls get revenge on youtube ( nsfw ) :D

My gf only plays a little, mostly sims and stuff like roller coaster tycoon. She's easily distracted though,always does 10 things at the same time and has an attention span of a cat in a milk factory. Meaning if she looks at my hoi3 screen for instance all she sees is a bunch of numbers and some counters on a map, which takes about 5 seconds till she goes back to watching some guy on youtube blogging about food :blush: Of course not all women are like that, heck most guys that ask me about games wonna know what console I use. If you reply; I'm mostly a pc-gamer they tend to eyebrow me and walk away.

Paradox games are a niche in itself, finding out how many of the players are female as well is kinda pointless to me. Especially because I think alot of women just don't want to invest alot of time in a game. They prefer easy to learn games that you can play for an hour or so, not games where you have to read a tutorial or manual for 2 hours and you have to invest at least a couple of days to get some meaningfull campaign going. At least, that's my humble experience with pc-games and boardgames alike.
 
My gf only plays a little, mostly sims and stuff like roller coaster tycoon. She's easily distracted though,always does 10 things at the same time and has an attention span of a cat in a milk factory. Meaning if she looks at my hoi3 screen for instance all she sees is a bunch of numbers and some counters on a map, which takes about 5 seconds till she goes back to watching some guy on youtube blogging about food :blush: Of course not all women are like that, heck most guys that ask me about games wonna know what console I use. If you reply; I'm mostly a pc-gamer they tend to eyebrow me and walk away.

Well, I don't think this is a girl-only problem by any means at all. I too regard hoi3 as a bunch of counters and numbers that are too difficult to use. Of course, I'm sure hardcore hoi fans will call me a sissy and not real man, because I don't know anything about nato counters and think that "dumbed down" hoi4 will be better than "hardcore" hoi3. I have multiple friends who take that stance with all PI games, one of them described them as "a bunch of random events on a map". Which is only to be expected, because it is a very aquired taste. I occasionally wonder myself how the hell I managed to get into those games. In ck2 I sat on the tutorial island and laughed for hours as my family became clubfoot, harelip and inbred as they became more and more inbred over the centuries. With other games...I don't remember what was fun about them when I first played them. All I remember is going "WHAT THE HELL JUST HAPPENED THERE?! WHAT?!" every other minute, which is of course some sort of fun, I guess, but in the same way that Dwarf Fortress is fun.

But the point here is - I think we don't have any statistics about PI games, especially their historical grand strategy titles, so this discussion is sort of pointless, because it is flawed from the very premise. Namely, how can we discuss why fewer women play PDS titles, if we don't have any solid facts supporting the premise that fewer women play those titles. Guesswork based on guesswork is futile.
 
Whenever I ask my women gamer friends why they don't play [exceptionally male dominated video game genre] their answer is always the same: The community, the community, the community. Very little, if any, consistent barriers exist over content or mechanics.

It's not just sexist jerks, who we can all acknowledge exist in some capacity, but also well meaning guys who nonetheless make them uncomfortable by responding to a womans' presence with disbelief, wonder, or pedestaling.

This thread has examples of both.

Implying that gamers actually care about the community. Most gamers just want to play the game, not get involved with communities.

Seriously, you sound so much like a Kotaku/Gamasutra/Polygon article it's embarrassing.

People that don't play games, don't play them because they don't like the game. If the game was not made for them, I don't know why they would play it.
 
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Implying that gamers actually care about the community. Most gamers just want to play the game, not get involved with communities.

Seriously, you sound so much like a Kotaku/Gamasutra/Polygon article it's embarrassing.

People that don't play games, don't play them because they don't like the game. If the game was not made for them, I don't know why they would play it.

Are you implying that PDS games are "made for men"?
 
Well, the operative phrase in my post was "bachelor's degree"; once we get to post-graduate and doctoral level education, things change quite a bit. While you can teach with a bachelor's degree, the average teacher in the US has a master's.
Only at the collegiate level. Most HS and lower do not.
 
Are you implying that PDS games are "made for men"?

Yes, that's exactly what I'm implying. With the nuance that it might have been accidental, not intentional. Not sure if it's the thematic or the game play, but the game is clearly targeted at a certain demographic: hardcore strategy fans, and this demographic is predominantly male. Compare it with lighter strategy like League of Legends, Majesty or Kingdom Rush, /gsg/ is clearly a patriarchal endeavour. This is just the thing with niche games, their target demographic is very limited and, although things have certainly improved with EU4 and CK2, the target is nowhere near universal or gender-neutral.

And no, I don't have concrete statistics, but I can tell you about the above-mentioned statistics that females make up around 50% of all gamers, that's clearly biased as it includes all gamers, including casuals and mobile gamers, and it's NOTrelevant to the OP's question.

Hint: only Paradox can answer this question with numbers since they have the statistics and I don't think they gather gender statistics as it is mostly irrelevant and offensive.
 
Pretty clear who's doing the implying there.

It's OK, I took the bait and ran with it, I'm not below a debate, even with such a silly topic. It is the era of #GamerGate and we should get used to defending our games from political and ideological attacks.
 
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Yes, that's exactly what I'm implying. With the nuance that it might have been accidental, not intentional. Not sure if it's the thematic or the game play, but the game is clearly targeted at a certain demographic: hardcore strategy fans, and this demographic is predominantly male. Compare it with lighter strategy like League of Legends, Majesty or Kingdom Rush, /gsg/ is clearly a patriarchal endeavour. This is just the thing with niche games, their target demographic is very limited and, although things have certainly improved with EU4 and CK2, the target is nowhere near universal or gender-neutral.

And no, I don't have concrete statistics, but I can tell you about the above-mentioned statistics that females make up around 50% of all gamers, that's clearly biased as it includes all gamers, including casuals and mobile gamers, and it's NOTrelevant to the OP's question.

Hint: only Paradox can answer this question with numbers since they have the statistics and I don't think they gather gender statistics as it is mostly irrelevant and offensive.

Well, Paradox games are one of those few games I've actually seen that don't have any gender bias whatsoever. Not in the artwork, not in the gameplay(at least not more than historically necessary) and not in the marketing. In that sense, it seems odd to presume that they are inherently male-orientated games. Unless one claims that war, diplomacy, politics and trade are very manly things that are unsuited for puny female brain that is designed to deal with babies and social problems...Which I hope nobody is sincerely claiming.

But I don't quite agree about the targeted demographic being hardcore strategy fans. Of course, core playerbase probably is, but you know, because there aren't many hardcore strategy fans available, it is wise to target those games towards people who just generally like history. Or incest and murder, which is how I got into PI games. I'm sure we can agree that hardcore strategy fans are not in the majority, most players are probably quite casual about it.

And yes, I know that if anyone, then Paradox can answer this question. Or Steam, if they should have such statistics available. Which is why I said earlier that this discussion is mildly purposeless because we don't have any relevant data whatsoever. So in essence, what has happened is a discussion on whether women are inherently more into knitting or not, which is basically just a festival of "show your baseless gender prejudice and win a privilege to call people SJWs if they disagree".
 
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Or it means that women understand better than men, that a degree in history doesn't tend to help you gain a decent paying job.

I absolutely love history, but I don't have a degree in it, so according to the logic shown above, I don't have any interest in history.

I doubt it, as other universitary social sciences degrees like History of Art or Philology are overwhelmingly taken by women and their usefulness (to get a job) is similarly limited.

I am aware that the data given is not the final proof, but it certainly points in the direction that women has less interest in history than men (at least in Spain).
 
"Men fight to prove a point and maintain honor/respect. It's less likely two men will fight if nobody else is around. Women will fight because they are angry, and will do so even if nobody else is around to watch"

you can just stop that nonsense.

Errr... Which nonsense? I didnt write that.