Different is one thing, weird is another.
I don't care I am loving season 3
- Thread starter Gingerbread Demon
- Start date
Weird is just another day in Trek.
Uh, why would male majority need to be explained in the military (or quasi military)? Do you need an explanation as to why more men are bricklayers and more women are nurses? Of course not.
I don't need an explanation at all. In Trek's future, everything is open to everyone. Why should I be bothered?
And? Sometimes Trek is crap. Sometimes it's great. It's more or less average viewing for me.
I'm just trying to figure out what went wrong with the show. Asking questions is a way to explore that. Some people just accept everything, without question. I don't.
I guess I'm just used to a higher quality of Trek, and a little disappointed in this.
Ok, let me be quite blunt here. I don't accept it without question. I am initially unbothered by this largely because I work in a field largely female in composition of workers, I have multiple friends who are female who served in the military, some officers, some enlisted. I have less concerns with gender roles changing or modifying based on the future, because there has already been changes.
Finally, I personally find the answers in the text. If I take your assumption that in the future the majority serving in Starfleet are male, then the Burn answers that. Multiple ships destroyed when that event occurs, thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of personnel are lost. Starfleet enters a new, more protectionist, phase and the results are the composition of ship crews adjust based upon need and available popuplation.
Finally, no I don't accept everything. I have been rationalizing and coming up with explanations since I watched Where No Man Has Gone Before followed by Balance of Terror. No one gave me explanations for those changes. I don't feel I need to explain everything.
I'm used to ups and downs in my Trek. So I don't get disappointed. I shrug and move on.
Don't you find it odd that you're the only person here who cares about the gender ratio?
Nothing went wrong.
It's always fascinating to me to discover the limits for a person's suspension of disbelief.
"Matter/antimatter energy generation? Yawn. Matter transporting and reassembling? Boring. Energy to mass replication down to the atomic level? Yesterday's news. Female dominated work space? Too far!"
It reminds me of an anecdote I heard from Chuck of SF Debris when he was reviewing Angel One. Now, Angel One has an interesting take on the whole gender politics thing, and Chuck couldn't resist commenting on it. He tells the story of being interviewed for a job and one of the questions was "How would you feel working in an office space primarily dominated by women." He paused and the interviewer interjected to say "Not very comfortable, huh?" To which Chuck replies, "No, I was trying to think of an inoffensive way to say, 'What a stupid question.' What does the number of women in the office have to do with my ability to do the job short of not having a long line for the bathroom?"
And that's my question. Yes, current US military statistics still have male domination in the ranks. Why? Because only in the last 30 to 40 years have they looked at increasing the number of jobs open to female personnel, in the past held by males. There is a cultural shift that has been operating leading to an increase in female enlistment, from roughly 2.2 percent in the 70s to 17% currently. And that is not including the strong military cultural components that struggle with having females in certain jobs, with women 28% more likely to leave the service, than male service members.
We are moving towards more equity in such jobs and that percentage is increasing pretty regularly. So, I don't find it a stretch of disbelief to think that there would be a different breakdown in the future.
I don't think the current gender make-up of the US military is a good basis to compare against the gender make-up of Starfleet (a completely different org) hundreds of years in the future.
Even going by Star Trek canon, we have only seen the gender make-up of a very small sample of bridge crews (less than 20) out of the thousands upon thousands of different bridge crews over the decades. There's no way to know what the typical gender make-up of a bridge crew is in Starfleet and it seems perfectly normal that some might be male dominated, some might be female dominated, and some might be split down the middle.
Even going by Star Trek canon, we have only seen the gender make-up of a very small sample of bridge crews (less than 20) out of the thousands upon thousands of different bridge crews over the decades. There's no way to know what the typical gender make-up of a bridge crew is in Starfleet and it seems perfectly normal that some might be male dominated, some might be female dominated, and some might be split down the middle.
Well, no of course not. But, I had to start with the poster's point of reference, i.e. the gender ratio seems "off" for a "quasi-military organization (their words). So, we have to start with that, and expand upon why that might be, and, as you rightly point out, there is no realistic way to know how ships are actually made up, nor what changes or stressors would be encountered in universe.
I guess if you work with a lot of women, then maybe you don't notice it as much? But, that's a subjective thing. Also, as I said, the "burn" was so bad, it was comical. Very disappointing. But, that really doesn't explain why all the women. Especially since the show started out way before that.
Not really sure what your point is.
That's your opinion.
So people still like to gatekeep what is good trek and bad trek, and speak for the rest of us?
And in pretty terrible ways as well. Like the named crew of the Titan we see on screen has a total of two men? Maybe three? Discovery's named crew on the ship in season 4 has seven or eight IIRC, and Disco has a larger crew in general, but as a proportion it's definitely closer to half than the Titan's. And yet it's Discovery that generates so much discussion about gender ratio, not Picard.
It has no bearing on my job. Starfleet the same way. As I said this feels like a solution in search of a problem. Others have detailed how many males in Discovery so again I fail to find an issue, especially in Trek's open future.
I don't see it as having anything to do with the future, as women will still be women, and men will be men. I don't think they will change that much, if at all. It just takes away from the show. They seem to be trying to appease people, when they should have been trying to make a better show instead.
Ok then.
I as a Wasp have 0 issue with it. Egalitarian society should have differences.
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