Cumulative advantage
May. 22nd, 2012 10:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pktechgirlbackupWhen I played D&D, the players were never less than 30% female, and often 50%. Nonetheless, 100% of the GMs were male. Bias can be subtle, but I know the people well enough to assert that the explanation was not simple sexism. But if you asked each player when they started, women never said earlier than college, and men never said later than middle school. The men had 10 additional years of learning to GM before the women even knew something was there. DMing is a skill gained in part through practice, and while a woman could choose to put that time in, she'd have to spend a lot of time doing it, and convince friends to spend a long time playing a boring, frustrating game before she got good. As a person who has tried to do this, I can tell you that you give up pretty quickly.
There's also a pretty clear pattern among my social groups, in which women have close friends of both genders, and men have close female friends. My hypothesis is at the time girls were learning whateverthefuck skill it is that lets you deepen a friendship's emotional level, boys were being discouraged from doing so, due to homophobia and gender policing. We mock the emotional viciousness of tween girls, but the fact is that a lot of that stems from their social-emotional reach exceeding their grasp, and mistakes hurt.*
So by the time you get to college, or even high school, girls have more emotional-social skills than boys. Even a boy who has conquered all homophobic culture and gender policing, and wants deepen his friendship with another boy who's done the same, has to overcome both his own ineptitude and that of his partner. Whereas the girls are just sitting there, with their improved articulation and listening skills. ** Worse, it's is self-reinforcing, as close friendships with girls relieve the pressure that might drive them to take some risks with boys, and friendships with boys give girls the skills to work with someone at a lower skill level than them.
This isn't a total explanation of course, and there are female DMs who started playing at 8 and straight men who have deep emotional friendships with men and only men. But don't underestimate small, cumulative pressures.
*They are also experiencing adults making their lives horrible. My tiny ninjas dodge most of that crap because the school has set up the system properly.
**I feel like a concrete example would be helpful here. Emotionally close friendships are based in part of a delicate dance of reciprocal self-disclosure. There's some skill involved in that: estimating the importance of what your friend disclosed, determining an appropriate disclosure about yourself, disclosing it, recognizing if you're being sharked or this simply isn't a person you want to be close to, appropriate follow up...
There's also a pretty clear pattern among my social groups, in which women have close friends of both genders, and men have close female friends. My hypothesis is at the time girls were learning whateverthefuck skill it is that lets you deepen a friendship's emotional level, boys were being discouraged from doing so, due to homophobia and gender policing. We mock the emotional viciousness of tween girls, but the fact is that a lot of that stems from their social-emotional reach exceeding their grasp, and mistakes hurt.*
So by the time you get to college, or even high school, girls have more emotional-social skills than boys. Even a boy who has conquered all homophobic culture and gender policing, and wants deepen his friendship with another boy who's done the same, has to overcome both his own ineptitude and that of his partner. Whereas the girls are just sitting there, with their improved articulation and listening skills. ** Worse, it's is self-reinforcing, as close friendships with girls relieve the pressure that might drive them to take some risks with boys, and friendships with boys give girls the skills to work with someone at a lower skill level than them.
This isn't a total explanation of course, and there are female DMs who started playing at 8 and straight men who have deep emotional friendships with men and only men. But don't underestimate small, cumulative pressures.
*They are also experiencing adults making their lives horrible. My tiny ninjas dodge most of that crap because the school has set up the system properly.
**I feel like a concrete example would be helpful here. Emotionally close friendships are based in part of a delicate dance of reciprocal self-disclosure. There's some skill involved in that: estimating the importance of what your friend disclosed, determining an appropriate disclosure about yourself, disclosing it, recognizing if you're being sharked or this simply isn't a person you want to be close to, appropriate follow up...
