Gender Ratio in NZ Larping Community?

Community Larp discussion
#1

Which gender are you?

  • Male
  • Female
  • Male who likes playing Female Roles
  • Female who likes playing Male Roles

0 voters

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I’ve seen some mention of a lack of female roles in a few posts across Diatribe, most noticeable is the mention of quickly disappearing female roles at Chimera last year. These instances and conversations I’ve had with other larpers got me thinking; what is the gender ratio for the NZ larping community? How many girls are there to guys?

I recognise that the larps at Chimera last year had more male roles than female, and that a number of the games were sourced from overseas. As a GM, I prefer to run games that I create, rather than those of other people. With that in mind, and while busy working on a larp, it got me wondering how many roles of each gender I should make, roughly. I realise it’s always a smart idea to have a bunch of gender-neutral characters to ensure that the roles can be filled by whoever is available, but that doesn’t necessarily give an appropriate balance to the gender ratio of the community.

Does anyone have a rough idea of how many girls to guys there are in the community? At the last larp you were at, were the gender neutral characters taken by girls or guys? Have you heard a girl/guy complain about the lack of fe/male roles available in larps in NZ?

I realise that these questions might be hard to definitively answer without taking some kind of census, but I thought I’d try before assigning genders to the last few characters (neutral or otherwise).

#2

It depends on what sort of game you’re running, and where in New Zealand you’re based.

From my general experience, in Auckland, the ratio of women to men in larping is usually 50:50, sometimes 40:60. Chimera 2008, out of 51 attendees, 21 were women while 30 were male. For Flight of the Hindenberg, I believe the ratio was just over 50:50 in favour of women. For Chimera 2009, 25 out of 64 attendees were female, and for Great Exhibition 34 out of 72 were women. This Chimera, there are 33 women out of 80 registrations, but Refuge reports they are desperately short of men.

You know, these numbers are startling because I always thought there were more women. Maybe we’re just louder. I should note that the women sign up quicker and are more organised, which is why the female roles go fast, and that might be why it seems like there’s more of us.

Anyway, back to the maths. Running Wolfgang, the numbers were definitely 50:50 but with an odd distribution over PC/NPC. Two thirds of the PCs were male, but two thirds of the NPCs were women. When I ran “Masquerade on Fleet Street” in Auckland (twice) I didn’t notice a gender bias either way. I had half male, half female characters and I never noticed a lag in either gender. I’m currently playing in the White Wolf Requiem campaign “New Horizons”, and that’s heavily in favour of males. The ratio is 70:30 male to female.

My only game running experience in Wellington has been when I ran “Masquerade on Fleet Street” in March. Contrary to everything I’d heard about the Wellington gaming scene, the women outnumbered the men and I had real trouble scroungning up menfolk for the last 6 or so male roles. I understand this is contrary to the general gender trend as based on KapCon numbers.

#3

I think its best to write for 50:50 (with some fudge in the middle which could go either way), or try and write genderless characters (as we did for Middenburg; just change the names at the last minute, or use ambiguous ones - there are lists for that sort of thing). That way you’re covered regardless.

I’m currently running into a problem with overseas games without enough female parts - all the larger ones I’m interested have highly skewed gender ratios, with at most 30% women. And that’s just bloody rude, not to mention making the games useless for off the shelf play.

#4

Yeah, 50:50 is a good ratio to start but leave some characters that can be easily switched between Genders. When I was writing Truth, Justice and Spandex! I had 18 roles, 7 Male, 7 Female and 4 which could go either way.

#5

It sounds like a 1:1 split would work well, with some gender neutral characters to allow for sway either way. Perhaps I will tinker with the idea of having the gender swayed either way depending on the themes of the larps I create, but not for this initial one.

#6

I’ve been trying for a third women, a third men, and a third that are not gender tagged. Life is easier when you have people who don’t mind (or prefer) same-sex love affairs. (I like writing romances in. :wink: )

Wellington has more male roleplayers than female, but is closer to parity in live games. Some indicative statistics: in the Kapcon of Jan 2009, just under a quarter of the con attendees (27/119) were female; at the headline larp on the Saturday night, just over a third of the players (21/62) were female. Put another way, 78% of the available women chose to play in the larp, compared to 45% of the available men. But I think from subjective observations that the percentage of women larping is getting higher around here - and then there’s the Fleet St game which got up to parity.

#7

An equally interesting question would be around who writes/produces larp events ? It may be that if larp organisers produce gender-biased larps, and that if more men were creating larps then they could be filtering in favour of male participants. Just a thought.

#8

An interesting point, I hope I don’t end up doing that in the games I make.

#9

Maybe running a monthly Glee larp would help attract more females to larping? Or possibly drive away some males…

#10

I didn’t vote in the poll since I"m not actually in NZ and thus not really part of the figuring, but I think this topic is interesting.

Does there seem to be any kind of pattern in the games that did or didn’t have an even gender spread? Genre-wise, I’m thinking mostly. Do women seem to gravitate toward one kind of game/setting and men to another? Are there some genres or plot elements that work better with an uneven distribution? (And therefore if gm’s are striving for that certain thing, should they try to force some inequality?)

I find what Anna said about women signing up quicker and being more organized very interesting. It’s funny how something like that skews the perception of how many of us there are.

#11

[quote=“JanetLin”]I didn’t vote in the poll since I"m not actually in NZ and thus not really part of the figuring, but I think this topic is interesting.

Does there seem to be any kind of pattern in the games that did or didn’t have an even gender spread? Genre-wise, I’m thinking mostly. Do women seem to gravitate toward one kind of game/setting and men to another? Are there some genres or plot elements that work better with an uneven distribution? (And therefore if gm’s are striving for that certain thing, should they try to force some inequality?)

I find what Anna said about women signing up quicker and being more organized very interesting. It’s funny how something like that skews the perception of how many of us there are.[/quote]

It appears that you’re thinking along the same vein as I am. I’m considering skewing the character gender ratio based on the genre of the game and stereotypical gender preferences, although only for future games after the one I’m currently planning. As for whether certain elements work better with a specific gender distribution, I’m sure there are. What those elements are, and what ratios could best fit, is another more detailed thing entirely.

#12

Do we have any budding sociologists or the like who need a Masters/Doctoral thesis topic?

#13

[quote=“Tetrajak”]
It appears that you’re thinking along the same vein as I am. I’m considering skewing the character gender ratio based on the genre of the game and stereotypical gender preferences, although only for future games after the one I’m currently planning. As for whether certain elements work better with a specific gender distribution, I’m sure there are. What those elements are, and what ratios could best fit, is another more detailed thing entirely.[/quote]

When looking at the gender preference for specific LARPs (particularly those with pre-written characters) is it possible to separate out how much of the apparent gender bias is due to preferences about the genre and how much is due to people looking at the cast list and deciding there are no good parts for them?

#14

I think it’s best to write pregen larps with an even gender ratio, to make them more replayable by other groups with different gender rations and to reduce the amount of self-fulfilling prophesy. Variation in ratio for any given run can be handled by having some gender-neutral characters, having a number of optional characters of both genders, and sometimes by cross-dressing or re-assigning gender to characters (we did a lot of the latter for Hindenburg, and it would have been easier had they been written as gender-neutral to start with).

However, there will always be larps where exceptions need to be made. I had a real difficulty getting Camelot gender-neutral, and in the end I gave up. I wanted to be faithful to the stories, and they’re chocked full of knights. I gathered every interesting female character I could from the stories, and invented a number of extra maidens, and cut out some major male roles, but it still wasn’t even. To get it even I would have had to cut out seminal male characters, and I couldn’t bring myself to mess that much with the plots I had in mind. One of the reasons I tried so hard is that I had an inkling that the genre would appeal at least as much to women as men.

In the end I had 10 required male characters, and 9 required female characters. Then an additional 3 optional female characters, and 2 optional male characters. Run with full numbers it’s 12 male and 12 female, and it can also be run with 10/10 or 11/11, so I got pretty close to even, but it still requires more males than females to run.