Gender Bias in Character Creation

[RiyahArp]

Look at the gender makeup of the shop classes in a high school. Metal shop? 100% boys. Wood Shop? 100% boys. Auto Shop? 100% boys. Cooking class? Mostly girls. Textiles? 100% girls. Stagecraft, mostly girls. Acting, about evenly split. .

Umm..i have experience with this XD

In a vocational high school, they actually rotate everyone throughout every single trade for the first year of shop classes (it was split half academics, half shop.) That means men did hairdressing and women welding before everyone decided on a tech "major." The women generally sorted out into hairdressing, graphic design/printmaking, and machine drafting, with some as outliers in other fields. The men did all but hairdressing. it was 75-25% or less men/women, mostly because most women went to the normal high school which prepped you for college.

The issue is that, well, people talk about interests in trades, but few people have actually tried them. They don't offer shop in many schools any more, because of liability reasons, and because owning lathes were expensive before they introduced a lot of mechanical c and c to it. Women get sorted out of trades more because of the massive physical burden of the jobs. The ones they chose were generally the ones with the least physical burden, save for electronics. It's not really gender bias for construction or carpentry for example, it's more that you find out the job desctiption involves constant lifting of 100 pound boxes of roofing tile, per se. Or welding sounds romantic...rosie the riveter, right? But having hte heavy mask on and dealing with the raw heat and sparks for 8 hours is yuck. And dangerous! I still have a scar from molten solder on my wrist.

I mean, its less about being excluded and more about how painful they are and who can endure them, some times.