Experiences Gender and Genre (again!)

[welian]

Hey everyone!

A long time ago, out of curiosity, I ran a poll to see if there was any correlation between gender and preferred genre. It's been a couple years, so I'd like to run the poll again and see what's different - this version is more detailed and has more questions about gender and romantic orientation.

It's an anonymous poll, at no point will I be asking for your username or any other identifiable personable information.

However, you are absolutely welcome and invited to discuss such personal details as it relates the topic of this thread - is it true that girls like romance and guys like action? Are we imagining that there are more guys interested in sci-fi than girls? Groups versus 1x1s? Let's take a poll and find out!

Poll:

Gender and Genre 2.0

Let's find out if the stereotypes are true!

forms.gle

Responses:

Gender and Genre 2.0

Let's find out if the stereotypes are true!

docs.google.com

 

[welian]

Since I made this thread, I'll start off the discussion - in my experience, my more actiony roleplays have drawn a higher proportion of male players compared to my slice-of-life settings, which tend to attract a higher proportion of female players. I'm not sure why? Plenty of guys I know like character drama too.

 

[Idea]

The way I see it, gender can influence one's preferences, but ultimately like with most demographic-taste relations a person's life experiences and personality have a much stronger influence. So overall, I believe that with a large enough sample you will find it skewed, but only slightly, whereas with smaller samples pretty much anything can happen.

Going by my experiences alone, I have found more girls in 1x1 roleplays versus group roleplays (in fact, an almost 100% disparity, with virtually all of my 1x1 partners having been (among those I knew) girls, but most of my group roleplay members having been males (again, among those I knew) ), and I have also found some skews in regards to romance and other relatioship-focused plots, but anime-esque genres like magical girls, mechas and harem tend to have more guys (big shocker, I know ). Guys also seem to have more of a tendency to go for the bizarre or at least put up with it.

Going by this, I believe familiarity with given topics, is an important factor, as well as one's tendency to engage with more unorthodox or experimental content that one may not necessarily be as comfortable with, which I think guys are prone to do. Pure speculation though, and based entirely on my personal experiences in this case a rather limited sample.

 

[rae2nerdy]

So as a 1x1 role player I think it’s a predominately female market regardless of genre. Males that do 1x1 are by far the minority.

I do fandom (HP) and Fantasy mostly with the odd Superhero RP and I cant say as I ever noticed any real difference in who plays what given the ratio of men to women in 1x1.

 

[Jet]

Since I made this thread, I'll start off the discussion - in my experience, my more actiony roleplays have drawn a higher proportion of male players compared to my slice-of-life settings, which tend to attract a higher proportion of female players. I'm not sure why? Plenty of guys I know like character drama too.

Pre post on RPN, important to say that outliers to trends are common. They're accepted and cool with me. However if we're examining billions of men and women certain trends exist because of biological differences.

Men gravitate towards things more than women who gravitate towards people. I haven't looked at your data but there's a reason why science fiction conventions are sausage-fests. I'd be shocked if Sci-fi wasn't mostly male, because Sci-fi is half about cool objects that don't exist yet like intergalactic space ships and laser swords. It's the same reason most car fanatics are men. Guys like cool toys, lifted trucks and lambos yee-yee. Women focus on people more which is why slice of life, which is interpersonal relationship focused, is a more feminine space. Look at the demographics of romance stories, it skews female. And it's not that women are all wuvyduvy in comparison to men, it's that women find people and relationships highly interesting on average compared to men. Again, important to stress how I'm talking about vast generalizations and the tall part of the bell curve. If anyone reading operates outside of these generalizations it isn't a shot to you. Personally I prefer the margins.

Now onto action. Men are more violent so we find violent shit more interesting. Splosions yee-yee, test is a hell of a drug. You combine that with object focus and it's no wonder why violent Sci-fi is the epitome of male dominant. If you take everyone who's read a Warhammer 40k book and throw them in a room it's gonna be a 100-1 ratio of men to women lmao.

Where you see a lot of crossover between male and female interests is fantasy/action dramas. Things where characters are a huge focus but there's also cool magic/gadgets and action scenes (clears throat) Game of Thrones. If you skew too far to people focus its a girl's club and if you skew too far to the gadgets and fighting its a bunch of guys. I haven't looked at your results but over millions of people these trends do exist and you'll see that played out here.

But lemme put this in bold for the people in the back who didn't hear, no I'm not denying the existence of outliers but trends exist, I'm talking about distributions. I swear if someone replies with "YOU'RE WRONG I LIKE...." I will headbut my phone.

 

[still watching fma]

Outside of rpn, I just want to know where all the girls that are interested in the stuff I am, are at. The media tells me more than half of the gamers out there, for example, are women.

edit: Naruto was the only big shonen anime verse there. But the most popular one out there is Boku no hero. Followed by black clover, fairy tail, and then naruto. Just wanted to let you know. I was looking for rp forums for specific verses a few months ago. welian

 

[BackSet]

Okay, so, I answered the quiz twice because I realized I answered some things wrong but whatever. I'm not exactly sure ir there is or isn't a corolation between gender and genres and I don't really think we have a big enough sample size to test that (or a control group if that's even possible) but I suppose it's possible. I know that I'm currently in a group rp with two males (including myself) and two females and that there are three female characters and one male (technically two but one's an extention of one of the three female characters) and two of the three female characters are played by males.

Wait, where was I going with this.

 

[welian]

I'm not sure, but you raise a great point! I should have added a question in about what gender characters we prefer to play. Does it ever feel like pulling teeth to get a somewhat balanced gender ratio in a character list?

 

[BackSet]

Well, I generally don't care about gender balance. People'll play what people'll play. Speaking of, I have a roleplay to start up. A nice Christmas Gift.

 

[Malozing]

I'm not sure, but you raise a great point! I should have added a question in about what gender characters we prefer to play. Does it ever feel like pulling teeth to get a somewhat balanced gender ratio in a character list?

Well, I generally don't care about gender balance. People'll play what people'll play. Speaking of, I have a roleplay to start up. A nice Christmas Gift.

Like BackSet, I don't really think about balancing the genders on my character list. Early in my DnD 3.5 days, I mainly played male characters. 4e saw a shift to more female characters. Currently, I would say that my characters list is about 40% female-identifying, 45% male-identifying, and 5% non-binary.

 

[rae2nerdy]

Does it ever feel like pulling teeth to get a somewhat balanced gender ratio in a character list?

Not in 1x1s. If anything there is the opposite problem. Convincing people that you don’t have to pair character up along the lines of who wants to bone who.

I can’t tell you how many times people refuse to roleplay with me because I won’t do character ratios where every character with a CS has a playable opposite of the gender they’re attracted to.

Like god forbid we have any other relationship besides romance.

 

[welian]

Like god forbid we have any other relationship besides romance.

That's why I loooove playing irredeemable villains from time to time... no slow burn romance heel-face turn, just a character that your partner desperately wants to beat up.

 

[still watching fma]

I feel like 1x1's are a different beast. Groups are plagued by indifference and tyrantsx while 1x1's are plagued with thirst and high maintenance lovers lolololol

 

[Alteras]

Oooo, this is interesting.

Are you willing to release the full spreadsheet version? I have a statistics program that can perform some regressions on the dataset. It'll be interesting to see if there's any actual correlation and would get me some use out of this 40$ program I had to pay for only 6 months because my school is cheap and doesn't give discounts

 

[welian]

Alteras Sure! I'll send you the Google Sheet link in a little while.

 

[Jet]

Alteras

Just a thought to add context. RPN is a haven for the margins. Not passing negative judgement on fringe groups but it's a fact that this website is a place where average = minority. Especially when talking about anything gender-related. There's a large LGBT population here, many with interests counter to norm (effeminate men, tomboy women, no offense I don't have other words for it) there's also a lot of women who fall into nerd/geek community (a culture I am a part of ofc, so it's all love) which is (unfortunately) a minority of women as a whole. So the data gathered here won't reflect society at large imo. You may not see a correlation here but it does exist elsewhere.

If the question is just on RPing and preferred genre by gender for RPing, then my statement is irrelivent because this is a proper data set for the RP community. However if it's about overall interests by gender then you will definately see a much different picture here than in a broader view.

 

[Alteras]

Alteras

Just a thought to add context. RPN is a haven for the margins. Not passing negative judgement on fringe groups but it's a fact that this website is a place where average = minority. Especially when talking about anything gender-related. There's a large LGBT population here, many with interests counter to norm (effeminate men, tomboy women, no offense I don't have other words for it) there's also a lot of women who fall into nerd/geek community (a culture I am a part of ofc, so it's all love) which is (unfortunately) a minority of women as a whole. So the data gathered here won't reflect society at large imo. You may not see a correlation here but it does exist elsewhere.

If the question is just on RPing and preferred genre by gender for RPing, then my statement is irrelivent because this is a proper data set for the RP community. However if it's about overall interests by gender then you will definately see a much different picture here than in a broader view.

I haven't put this data into the program yet, but I think it'll be tough to find anything in the first place. Of course all of this is just for fun, but if I were to take it as a proper statistician, I'd say the data provided isn't gonna get me anywhere near 90% confidence in the results it gives. Most of it comes down to sampling problems, as you said before, there would be selection bias (data only from people who click on this thread), sampling size problems (too small of a set), variable problems (there are far too many reasonable variables that can be tested against gender), etc.

With this kind of thing, we're testing for statistical significance, which is really just "does it actually have a bearing on the result," and with this data size, I wouldn't at all be surprised to see a failure to reject the lack of significance. I think a better method with this would be a plot the data points on a graph (which I intend to do), but that doesn't give a clean picture.

Back to your main point, you're correct. Selection bias: the poll is a volunteer based polled occurring in a certain category for a niche hobby site. So in that term, what we're looking at would accurately be described as "Roleplaying Interests of Members of RPN tested against Gender." Again, asterisks with all the previous points stated.

Honestly, the only set that I have expectations for is the gender-genre. It is the broadest set and would be easy to test for.

Again, this is all for fun~ As much as I'd like to be big bad facebook and be able to predict everything with this data, I just like playing around with data and seeing what pops out.

 

[BackSet]

Or, to put it in short, layman's terms (which I've already said), we don't have a big enough sample size.

I'm not sure if that's technically Layman's terms but whatever.

 

[still watching fma]

wE NeAd MoAr PeePol 2 bee aKurit

 

[BackSet]

wE NeAd MoAr PeePol 2 bee aKurit

Pretty much, yeah.