Where in the Galaxy are the Female Gamers?
I’ve been obsessed with polls lately, mostly so I don’t create a cookie cutter toon right out of the box. I found on the official forums a really super-complete poll about gender/species/class/role/alignment. According to said poll, 20% of players plan to play female toons, and 72% plan to play male toons, with 8% undecided (lookit me doing math here).1
Now… I know full well that there are a lot of guys who play female toons, but very few girls who play male toons. I’m also scratching my head because in my WoW guild, the gender ratios IRL are close to 50/50, with some guys playing girls in-game. In general, in all the guilds I’ve been in during my WoW time, the male/female ratios have been pretty reasonable, and it was very rare that I was the only female in a 10-person raid.
But hey, there’s a poll that incorporates guys playing girls too!2 If you add together girls-playing-female-toons and guys-playing-female-toons, you get 35% of the TOONS will be female (which is not the same as the 20% above, not at all). If you add together the number of girls-playing-female-toons and girls-playing-male-toons, it comes out to 8% of the players IRL will be female.3
LOLWUT? 8% can that be right?4 I was used to being the lone girl when I started playing MMO’s, but this ain’t 2001. And it seems to me that the game concept is no more “testosterone-filled” than SWG or WoW, and there were PLENTY of women playing those. So what gives?
I’m forced to the conclusion that, uh… women aren’t as freakishly obsessed with the game as the men are and don’t bother to respond to these silly polls. I don’t know where I’m going with this. You can’t really trust random polls… or my math and analysis.
- The sample size for this poll is 9000+. In the previous complete poll from which the current one is derived, female toons were at 19%, male toons at 78%, and undecided at 3%. With 3000+ responses, the previous version did not have as large a pool. ↩
- This poll has a little over 2000 responses, whereas the complete poll cited above has over 9000 responses, and there is a definite result discrepancy. ↩
- Which, again, we’re taking with a grain of salt given that there are a little over 2000 responses to the poll. ↩
- Eep, in a previous gender poll thread, it was 6% (out of 2800ish responses)! ↩