[nasredin]

Kleothera > why there ARE so few women on most MUDs

Well, speaking seriously, I guess the primary reasons behind that are different. For example, Arctic is a hack-n-slash DikuMUD with little roleplay involved. In many cases, I neither know the gender of the other characters in my group, let alone the sex of the players behind them, nor care about all that.

I'd say that the real difference is in the preferences. In my experience, a lot of males find it exciting to entertain themselves with abstract things (be it science or playing in a casino), while most females prefer to spend their time on more substancial things. That does not necessarily mean that the women are less fit for the abstract tasks, only that they are usually less fascinated with the far-out concepts. Discussing whether this is a direct biological difference or the result of an entrenched tradition is a subject for a serious research and is hardly on-topic for this thread.

To illustrate my point, the best female chess players are about as good as the best male chess players; however, the total number of male players is greater than the number of female players by orders of magnitude. There are no serious sexist obstacles that can prevent a female player from playing chess if she really wants to; the women who don't play chess simply don't like that kind of entertainment.


Same with MUDs - to suffer from sexist stereotypes, a woman should play for long enough to be noticed and recognized. If the majority of the new players are male, that's not because the women are treated badly, but because they have better things to do.

Nasredin