Sexism in Tropico

[Richard40]

Equal pay for equal work and education is a nice sounding slogan, but it makes little sense in tropico.  Anybody who follows comparible worth theories here is headed for big trouble.  Despite beng a government owned socialist economy, the law of supply and demand still rules in individual worker decisions in Tropico, and you as leader should act accordingly.

Most jobs in Tropico are open to one sex only, and this can often create an imbalance where one sex (usually females) is underemployed, while jobs in the other sex (usually male) go unfilled.  This problem is not too serious in the uneducated occupations, because there are 2 very large and important uneducated occupations that are duel sex, construction workers and farmers, that can take up the slack if any sex imbalance occurs.  If an imbalance does occur, where you have unemployed females and open male only job slots, then you may need more premiuim pay for male only jobs, to tempt males from duel sex jobs to move there.  The more serious imbalance in the uneducated jobs often occurs because of location.  Jobs that are distant from housing and other amenities are more likely to be unfilled and deserve premium pay.  Duel sex jobs rerely deserve premium pay, even if vitally important, because they are normally easier to fill (except  for the remote construction exception).

In the educated jobs this sex imbalance problem can become far more serious because there is only 1 category, factory workers, that is duel sex, with no duel sex college jobs (If gurus like CK know how to make any college jobs duel sex it would help a little.  I would recommend doctors, since there are plenty of them, and in the socialist coutries this game is based on female doctors were quite common.).  If pay is equal, this often results in a severe imbalance, with 80% of the school slots taken up by women, trying out for only 1-2 jobs, while the male only jobs remain cronically unfilled.  The solution to this is to be a sexist, and pay the male only jobs far more than you pay the female only or duel sex jobs, to both keep the females out of school, and encourage more males to go, and to take the male only jobs, rather than the duel sex factory jobs.  In severe sex imbalance situations this has often resulted in female and factory high school jobs being paid the same as some priority uneducated jobs, and female college jobs being paid the same as male only high school jobs.  I dont care about justice, I care about what works.

In deciding on premium pay there are 2 main considerations:
1.  Filled vs unfilled.  Any jobs that are cronically unfilled deserve more pay than jobs that are filled, even vital ones, because as long as a job is always filled, it is less vital.
2.  Vital vs non-vital.  Jobs that are either vital to the economy, or vital to maintaining your rule, deserve slightly more pay (eg: paying power plant workers more than journalists, regular hotel maids make more than bungalo maids), although this consideration, and the pay that goes with it, is much less important than whether the job is cronically unfilled.  For some jobs like power plants and generals, that have severe consequences if they fall short, it pays to create some excess capacity.  I would recommend excess capacity of 1/5 of the slots for power plants, and 1/3 of the slots for generals.

Given the 2 pay considerations above, I would recommend 4 pay categories for each pay level:
1.  Unfilled and vital.  High premium pay here, sometimes enough to match lowest priority jobs in the next education category.
2.  Unfilled and non-vital.  Slightly less premium than category 1.
3.  Filled and vital.  There should normally be a bigger difference between this category and category 3 than there is between category 1 and category 2, especially if it involves a sex imbalance.
4.  Filled and non vital.  There would normally be less difference between category 4 and category 3, than there would be between category 2 and category 3.

In summation, I recommend you use supply and demand to dictate your salaries.  Let others worry about abstract notions like justice and feelings.  Sexist male chouvanist egotistical pigs are frowned on in our society, but they can prosper in Tropico.

[Privateer0]

Thanks for the detailed article, Richard!

I think you captured the general spirit of gender balance in Tropico games well, although there are exceptions, of course. For instance, in the very early game, I usually need 2-5 diplomacy workers for government offices and only 2 palace guards, so females usually are more precious than males.

[El-Bueno]

yea I agree with the observations here, also the imbalance can become worse if you have a civil war on your hands. I had a game recently where I was fighting dozens of rebels, in total my soldiers plus the rebels equalled more than 100 males of the island which had total pop around 1000. So around 20% of the male pop was in the fighting.

Following some large casualties in battles this further sapped the male population, as replacement soliders were drafted. So I started to have a serious shortage of males to fight for me, and also work as teamsters. So I took the descision to close all fisherman wharfs, mines, and log camps, and so make my mian primary industry farming which could be run purely by females, and I upped my teamster and dock wages to attract males away from the farmer+builder jobs, so yet more inequality there!

[Coconut Kid]

... (If gurus like CK know how to make any college jobs dual sex it would help a little.  I would recommend doctors, since there are plenty of them, and in the socialist coutries this game is based on female doctors were quite common.) ... ,
I would recommend 4 pay categories for each pay level:
1.  Unfilled and vital.  High premium pay here, sometimes enough to match lowest priority jobs in the next education category.
2.  Unfilled and non-vital.  Slightly less premium than category 1.
3.  Filled and vital.  There should normally be a bigger difference between this category and category 3 than there is between category 1 and category 2, especially if it involves a sex imbalance.
4.  Filled and non vital.  There would normally be less difference between category 4 and category 3, than there would be between category 2 and category 3.  ...

I guess I did not respond to this interesting post because initially I saw it as another commentary on construction of a pay plan. There are some threads which discuss that in some detail.

I have have changed the Doctor unit to dual gender. I think I described it in another thread. The change is not hard for those who are comfortable with using a "hex-editor." I feel certain that the initial game didn't have more dual gender units because of the expense of two avatars. Using one avatar for the Doctor does not require much 'suspension of belief'.

It is evident that the game development distorted the gender identification of some jobs just to obtain some sort of gender balance. Otherwise, why only female:

• Engineer not the '50's sterotype
• Journalist - a better title is Propagandist
• Teacher
• Shopkeeper
• Bureaucrat

Meanwhile, in a socialist environment - or even a capitalist one - why only male:

• Attendant
• Fisherman
• Miner
• Teamster
• Soldier (there are female Rebels)
• Professor

.
For the most part, the difference does reflect the sterotypes of the 1950's in the capitalist world. In any case, it is now hard to simply change the code with so clearly male or female avatars. I have come to appreciate the additional complication injected of educational levels which also represent social class. So the balance in not only gender, but also class.

I do wish to point out one really big mistake made by the developers which was likely also a hurried reaction to "play balance" problems. That is the under-utilization of the Mother avatar. There are all sorts of conflicting hints in the documentation about how long the married females are out of the workforce in connection with babies. In actual game play after their appearance in the starting population (especially the preprogrammed scenarios), Mothers are rarely seen - even by players who run at normal (or slow) speed rather than hyper-speed. But meanwhile there is a constant churning among female employees which is not matched among male employees. Try to track females in a job in a building to gage gaining 'experience' and you will see what I speak of. I consider the evidence clear. While the period of pregancy passes in the blink of an eye (and probably doesn't caise the Mother avatar actually to appear), the period of "motherhood" in the published game is far different than the original intent. The official game guide speaks of the avatar as lasting from (at least) birth to the age of eight. It is clearly evident that number does not refer to years. The conclusion is that it means eight Months. That length of time has nothing to do with anything. In the game world, a pregnancy results in the creation of a Baby unit at birth. At three (3) years of age the Baby unit transforms to a Child unit. If the female parent of the Baby unit were somehow forced to assume the Mother avatar until the Baby became a Child -- I think the game would make reasonable sense.

Now that rant is out of the way, the question of pay as used to control gender balance among occupations is still on the table.

 

[Coconut Kid]

Inside the Sausage Factory: by Phil Steinmeyer -- originally appeared in Computer Games Magazine.

A snip:  So our initial plans for our Caribbean dictator game, Tropico (yes, we settled on a name) didn’t give much thought to women. However, the game has a heavy political emphasis. To support the politics, we wanted every character in the game (up to 500 or so), to be a unique individual. We gave them each a history, a job, a home, and (here it comes), a spouse. Well, most of them get spouses anyways – even fictional computer characters can strike out with the opposite sex. We decided on a true 50/50 male/female ratio.
Don’t get the wrong impression, all of us at PopTop are still a bunch of chauvinist pigs. As we created different character professions, we were happy to add ‘French Maid’ and, err, ‘Hostess of Easy Virtue’ (they help draw American tourists to your island).
While we were rolling with this ‘social realism’ concept, we added children, retirees, unemployed workers, full-time mothers and other groups seldom seen in computer games.
Unfortunately, we ran into a technical constraint. Because our characters are pre-rendered with a lot of different animations, they chew up a lot of memory. About 60% of our memory budget for a 32MB machine is spent on unit animations. With 40 professions, we didn’t have the memory to have two versions of each, one male and one female. So, in typical chauvinist pig manner, we decreed that only women could fill some positions (the aforementioned maid, ‘social hostess’, teacher, doctor, journalist), and only men could fill others (miner, banker, dock worker). Some decisions were easy – priests must be male (the Catholic church decided this one for us). Some were harder – spies, male or female? We chose female. When the cunning, attractive female spy encounters the macho, arrogant male general, don’t bet on the guy with the brass buttons.
Nine of the types had to be available to either men or women. Want to be a farmer or a factory worker? You’re in luck, both men and women can apply. Most of the non-employed unit types (children, retirees, etc.) can also be either gender.

So there you are. That's how we got what came out in T1.

[Coconut Kid]

11/16/09 Email
A reply has been posted to a topic you are watching by Richard40.
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Privateer, you are right that early in the game there is more need for women.  My post mainly described a late game situation, where you normally need lots of soldiers, police, generals, bankers, doctors, priests, bishops, where I find I end up with way more female educated than I need, and a shortage of male educated.  At that point, I noticed have a big pay premium for male only educated jobs, while paying much less for female educated and duel sex jobs, sometimes helps with the imbalance.

CK, I remember your post about how to alter the files to make doctors duel sex.  It would definitely help.  I'm a bit uneasy about tinkering with the files that way though, but since it looks like the lack of duel sex college educated jobs remains unfixed in T3, I might have to resort to that solution.

I suspect the technical problem of creating the extra avatars is indeed a major reason why more jobs are not duel sex.  Personally I don't mind that many jobs are [not] dual sex, but they definitely need at least one major occupation at each education level to be dual sex.

CK, I also like your idea to expand the role of the mother avatar to a longer period of years. It causes some turnover in the female occupations, but if the mother period is expanded that turnover is actually lessened. And we already have other unproductive units on the island, like children and oldsters, so why not mothers.  It would also add some possibility for new edicts, some that would expand the mother period, while others could reduce or even eliminate it.  Expanding the mother period could have the effect of also increasing the birth rate, pleasing the religious faction, and increasing children's happiness, since the mothers have less concern about raising their children.  Decreasing the mother period would expand the productive female work force, but at the cost of child happiness, decreased birthrate, and the religious faction, since you would be perceived as anti-mother.  You could have an option for state sponsored daycare, which would still reduce motherhood period, but with less adverse effects on birthrate and women's happiness (especially women in the intellectual faction, less so for women in the religious faction).