Not An Odd Parallel At All

Not an odd parallel at all

So here's the thing. Well, two things.

I'm one of those filthy tabletop game people. (So is my spouse; she has been since before we met, too.) After college, well, we needed to create a new group of people to get entirely too interested in the fall of oddly-shaped pieces of plastic and the lives of fictional elves. We are also, it must be said, on the old side. We remember the Before Times. And in the Before Times, and even a bit after that, game groups were invariably largely male. Indeed, it wasn't at all uncommon for a group of gamers to have *at absolute most* exactly one female member. (Take a look at some of the classic game-related comics-- take a look at the gender groupings in Knights of the Dinner Table or Order of the Stick. These are pretty typical; many groups had zero female members.)

But our post-college group kind of wavered, shifted, stabilized-- and suddenly, we had, and to this day, still have, a majority-female gaming table. There wasn't anything to it, honestly. It just... happened.

So here's the other thing.

The industry I work in isn't really known for progressive politics in many ways. It's one of those things, not restricted to any one company-- it's the entire industry. (It's not just politics, for that matter-- my industry can be incredibly reluctant to, say, upgrade technology. We don't like change much.)

But the specific company I work for? At one location, one particular division-- and not one you'd expect this of *at all*-- is currently majority trans.

That's even more surprising than the first one; I don't know what the current math is on the percentage of trans people in the population as a whole, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that it's less than, oh, ten percent. So if random chance was involved, what are the odds that we'd have one job category at one location be 57% trans?

So how did that happen, anyway?

I'm pretty sure that it's the same reason in both cases.

In our gaming group, as we formed, other women in our community who were tabletop gamers saw that we had multiple women in our group, that we didn't treat them like romance objects or second-class players, that they were comfortable and happy hanging out with us. And the female members of our group, of course, were happy to tell other women about how fun it was. So more asked to join our group. And now our table is so big we can't even fit more people in, and still majority-female.

And, well, I'm not trans, and I'm not in that community, but I'm going to guess that since we started hiring other trans folks, and treating them with respect, word got out that that's what we did-- treat them with respect-- and so other people came to us over some other employer where, say, they might be taking a chance on how they'd be treated.

And I'm glad that it's worked out that way, for them, and for us.

And... I don't know. I think that it illustrates a truth that gets overlooked by some people. If someone says "[Group] isn't interested in [Hobby/Vocation/Activity]," maybe what they aren't seeing is that people don't necessarily feel safe or comfortable or welcome in some spaces, and that if it's clear that that the space is welcoming, then the demographics suddenly start to reflect the people who are really out there instead of the stereotypes.

Or something like that. I don't know. I'm not a sociologist.

But what I do know is that I have a really cool tabletop gaming group.

And I do know that we were able to hire enough people in a location and position that had been pretty painfully understaffed.

And both of these things are good.

And, just between me and all of you, I think that basically treating people with respect got us there.