wow and body image

I was reading a blog the other day where the writer joked about being one of the half dozen people who play a female dwarf. Frankly, I was shocked!  No way players would choose their avatars on such trivial considerations. Like I was just saying to Chuck Norris, I’m always impressed by the maturity of the WoW community…

Anyway it certainly suggests a good subject for some data mining. Without further ado, here are the numbers:

	male	female	overall
Dwarf	88%	12%	5%
Orc	87%	13%	6%
Tauren	87%	13%	8%
Undead	73%	27%	11%
Troll	71%	29%	5%
Gnome	61%	39%	7%
Human	57%	43%	17%
Night Elf	53%	47%	16%
Blood Elf	49%	51%	15%
Draenei	46%	54%	9%

That is, 88% of Dwarfs are male and 12% are female. Overall, Dwarfs are 5% of the total population (NB not 5% of the Alliance).

There’s a well known experiment where people from different cultures are shown a set of photos of faces, and are asked to rank them in order of perceived beauty. The chosen ranking is always the same, whether the people in the experiment are from the Amazon or from Zimbabwe. Maybe the most charitable thing we can say is that those experimental results have been confirmed here.