I am always surprised when I read about sexism in CRPG's. I thought by adding gender-based stat adjustments to Arcanum, we would be eliminating this issue, since it made the sexes different but not unbalanced. I guess many people disagree. In any case, here is something I wrote over a year ago, when Arcanum first shipped and people were discussing the topic.
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As for the history of this decision, we didn't have this in the original game design specifications. We only had the race adjustments. We had hoped that the game would contain a great deal of content that would allow people playing different genders to have different experiences, and we did end up with some. For example, there are quests that have different solutions depending on if you are a man or a woman, and many dialogs take into account gender difference too. But as the game progressed, the difference seemed superficial.
That bothered some of us at Troika. We had wanted every stat to mean something in the game. Otherwise, why have it? If a male human fighter and a female human fighter have the exact same experience in the game, why even have both in the game? It takes a TREMENDOUS amount of art resources to make the gender-specific art animations, which was the main reason we dropped the gnome and halfling females from the game (we had planned from the beginning to not include dwarf or half-ogre females, for story reasons).
So it was during our balance phase that this issue came up. We had already deleted or replaced some skills and spells that were not being used, and to be honest, I was the person who pointed out that the gender stat seemed to do very little in our game other than determine whether the player was called "ma'am" or "sir". True, there were a handful of quests that had different solutions based on gender, but none of them were main-story arc quests, and there were not many of them.
At this point, someone suggested giving stat adjustments to gender, just like we did for race. Our initial reaction was "we can't do that, people won't expect to see that, no other game does that". But the more we thought about it, the more we realized that it fit our philosophy of making every choice matter. Gender should be more than just different art and a different title. Someone playing a male character and a female character should feel a difference between them.
But like all of our other adjustments, we wanted it to be balanced. Neither gender should be better, but we liked the idea of them being different. The first idea was a bonus tied into gender, so depending on which gender you picked, you got a bonus to some stat. But then someone pointed out that we didn't have female choices for four of the races, so you would always get the male bonus. So someone else said "Why not have a balanced adjustment for just females? A plus and a minus, so they are not better or worse but certainly different?". We played around with the idea and several adjustments, and everyone liked the "+1 constitution, -1 strength" adjustments. It especially made sense with the elves, who were matriarchal and stong magic-users. So we added it, along with a background to get rid of it if someone didn't like it.
And some people heard about this change and hated it.
I must admit I don't understand most of the objections. We didn't make one gender better than the other, we just made them different. We didn't pidgeon-hole any gender, since the ultimate potential is the same for both genders. It wasn't a decision made by a bunch of anti-feminist males, as all of the women here liked the idea and a few of the men were hesitant (if only because they were afraid of people misunderstanding the change, not because they didn't like the change itself). We simply made genders different.
Personally, I am offended by games that don't let me choose gender, or that treat different genders as identical, as if there is no difference between them. Difference is NOT a bad thing. Having men and women be the same is as bad as having elves and humans be the same. Elves are NOT pointy-eared humans. Women are NOT men with different art. But because we made them different doesn't mean elves are the race of choice or that women are better characters to play than men. They are just different.
I guess it all boils down to this: Troika wants every choice you make in the game to matter and to affect something. We don't care if the effect is good, bad or neutral, but we want the choice to make the game feel different for the chooser. Gender did not have this effect until we added the stat adjustments.
(Codex, talk to the hand, the one which just jerked off my husband and then wrote best geometric rpg system ever, you bunch of ungrateful faggots!)
