Originally Posted by whswhs
I really don't think I've found it to be much of an issue.
Way back in the twentieth century, I was visiting with my downstairs neighbor, who was one of my regulars, and talking with her and a friend of hers whom I knew slightly. I told the friend she would be welcome to take a look at my current sheaf of proposed games if she was interested, and my neighbor said, "Bill is a good GM for women." (I still consider that a high compliment.) The other woman played in my next round of campaigns and in fact was central to one of the best scenes I've ever had. More generally, my circle of players in San Diego was fairly close to 50% women.
So what accounts for my having so many women players? Part of it may be just that I try to subordinate private gratification in playing to the gratification of making the players interested and involved. Part of it is just that I've never hesitated to ask women if they wanted to play (and having multiple women players does help avoid the "singling out" effect of being the only woman at the table). But also, my games often have a lot of characterization and dialogue; and they often have overt sexual content, but they're explicit about the costs and risks involved, and about the agency of women in deciding how to deal with them.
As for other groups, I've had two gay men, a lesbian, a couple of bisexuals, an F-to-M transgendered player, and one or two asexual players in my circle in San Diego (and perhaps some in Riverside, but I didn't learn much about their personal lives). My circles have been predominantly white, but I've had players who were black, Hispanic, South Asian, and East Asian; I think the issue hasn't been that my games had something offputting, but that I recruit mainly via friends networks and cross-racial links in those are statistically uncommon (though both my South Asian and East Asian players were good friends of other players, and my black player became and has remained a good friend of some of them even after moving across the continent).
I think the one thing I would call a central takeaway from my experience is that players want to have and portray agency. Give them opportunities to make choices and produce outcomes, and make sure that all of them have such opportunities. And that's not something that can be accomplished by a system of game mechanics; it depends on the GM's care in managing a social group. I was a lot less practiced in that back in the 1990s than I am now . . .
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