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Originally Posted by whswhs
Well, in my version of dwarves, the worker dwarves definitely aren't cannon fodder. In fact they're mostly kept safe inside the mine, doing everything from cleanup chores to delicate crafts.
The ones who are expected to face danger are the adult males. Often this is simply being on guard at the mine entrance (with a genetically male worker dwarf at hand to run messages). But if someone needs to go on a trade journey, or take part in a war, or engage in diplomatic negotiations, that's male work. Of course, if you think about it, that's also largely male work in humans, and human males aren't quite thought of as cannon fodder, at least not in their relationship to their families, even though biologically we're the expendable ones.
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It's more like males tend to think of themselves as part of a Universal Warrior Cult of Masculinity(and the first rule about it is that you don't talk about it of course). Being "cannon fodder" kind of adds to the mystique.
Among Dwarves it is a good reason why females are so seldom seen. Besides the fact that they are slow breeders. And the fact that Dwarves are fanatically protective of their patrimony. And the fact that if Dwarves venerate ancestry maybe they want to have a posterity to venerate them.