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Because 99.9999% of the hobby is male???!

Or quite possibly GW doesnt worry about rampant "political correctness"...

Don't forget the Lustrian Amazons... Brettonian wizards.

I think its largely to do with the fact that it is a medieval game and on our planet, the medieval periods were dominated by men on the battlefield. Females, when they got to the battlefield, were either leaders or support.
Some races, such as Orks/Goblins and Lizardmen, really don't have any gender, either reproducing asexually, or through more diverse means.

hey, I'd probably not have resisted so much had there been more female models...

I think it's not so much that there aren't female models because "they didn't battle back in the day" that bothers me (and ask Xander, I'm no feminist or anything) but it's the slaanesh models that are barely clad... I love the new daemonette models Xander picked up, but it's just weird when they have no clothes. ok, well *I* find it weird when they have no clothes, or clothes EVERYWHERE except on a breast or something... then I'm like "wha!?"

I like the wood elves, and I love any female ranger-like model (more from Reaper minis, etc). I guess I still daydream about powerful women soldiers that are pretty and feminine. DON'T CRUSH MY DREAMS!

And of course all the Dark Elf female figures.  Sorceress, Witch Elves, I think the hydra tamers are female.  I've only seen the shots of the hydra from one angle and the faces of those tamer models are sort of androgynous.

My ex used to play High Elves and she was going to buy a ton of maiden guard and lop off their heads (that part I liked...good elves should be dead elves, evil elves are moderately acceptable ) and convert her whole army to a female army.  She never finished it (as far as I know) but I thought it was sort of a cool idea.

That said, most dwarves could be female.  You never know with all that beard.

well if you like female dwarf play warlords !!!!
Being the 1% i don't see any sexes with the bare breasted women models. How do you think they get teen age boys to play!!!!

Yes, it could seen as sexist, however, if you sell your product almost exclusively to young males then its hardly surprising.

The elves field female troops, being more open minded and culturally developed. Some races don't have females (Orcs) or their females are incapable of fighting (Skaven). (And would you really want female orcs? Really?) For some, it doesn't matter (Elves, Lizardmen.) For some the women are predatory (Dark Elves, Lahmian Vampires, but Vampires are all predatory). Ultimately, women taking part in battle as part of the standard draft is a recent thing in our world, and certainly didn't happen in medieval Europe, upon which WHFB is based. It was a sexist, racist world. These are modern concepts.
And lets not forget the female Ogre Man-eater. She isn't scantily clad, and a good thing too.

Daemonettes are the incarnations of the god of sex. Now, while I don't want to offend anyone, I feel the sales potential of male Daemonettes would be exceptionally low. I know I wouldn't buy one for my Slaaneshi. Look at the male wyches for Dark Eldar. They are an example of this, and everyone I know with DE has mail ordered the female ones exclusively. Coz they look nicer to them.
This is used by GW to show the Eldar in contrast to the Imperium, and yes they say, "perverted xenos" but its equally to show how backwards and narrow-minded the Imperium is.
And lets face it, I feel sexism is pretty low down on the Imperium's list of faults (genocide, xenophobia, dictatorship, repression of free speech and individual thought, etc). No one seems to be offended that the Imperium is basically space nazis They shoot aliens on sight for Christ's sake. They even have an eagle for their symbol. Frankly I love their political incorrectness, it makes them interesting. If they were super-PC good guys I wouldn't play 40k at all, its only the background that keeps me interested in it these days.

And ultimately its a game of toy soldiers

What about the parents of female gamers though?

See what I'm getting at here? Our cultural notions are coded for heterosexual males. Sex = woman, never mind that for 50% of the population (heterosexual women, homosexual men and bisexuals of both genders) sex = man. I just think it's a shame that none of us find it a bit odd that the only time female daemons should appear is serving a god of sex - it's an unfortunate message and I can see why there's a serious lack of girls playing Warhammer. What's a young girl to think where her perfectly normal sexual identity is presented as something to be feared in the form of Deamonettes or Witch Elves?

Agreed. I don't want to get into an argument about this, I just think it's an interesting cultural thing that Warhammer is an excellent posterboy for - women and their sexuality are literally demonised in the game's setting. It would be nice to see a female hero of the Empire or something (though we do have the Tzarina of Kislev, I guess). Warmachine seems to have no problem with female special characters hanging with the men.

Hellebron and Morathi.  Though not sure if they are in the newer books.  Back in 4th or 5th Edition you could take them both as characters, but now that I think about it, I don't think they did any model specifically for Hellebron, but they did have a Morathi on a pegasus.

Isn't Morathi the "hag sorceress"? The leader of the Witch Elves who is horrifically ugly, then becomes terrifyingly sexy when she bathes in the blood of young men?

Yeah...

Sorta.  Morathi was the Hag Queen, Malekith's mother, and she was a sorceress.  Crone Hellebron was the leader of the Witch Elves.  I don't think the blood was male or female, just Dark Elven, but I could be wrong about that part.  But that said, you are correct about Morathi bathing in blood to keep her young.  Crone Hellebron wasn't allowed to use the Cauldron of Blood, so she's the one that remained old and hideous.  That's from memory though, so again I might not be remembering that completely right.

Either way, what I was actually appealing for was a normal human female character who was performing a normal military role but just happened to be the opposite gender. That's what Warhammer lacks.

Incidentally, I did a quick survey of the Warhammer armies to see how they treated their womenfolk:

- Empire: no women models in the range.
- Bretonnia: Grail Damsels (associated with virginity and purity).
- Kislev: the Ice Queen (Kislev scores a point there).
- Dogs of War: had a special character who was essentially a black widow-type woman, renowned for poisoning her lovers.
- Wood Elves: Dryads (associated with capriciousness, spite and being unknowable to outsiders).
- High Elves: a small minority of figures in normal units are modelled to resemble females (half a point).
- Dark Elves: Witch Elves (psychopathic killers who use their sexuality to tempt men into being murdered. They abduct young men to become assassins).
- Beastmen: no female models in range.
- Chaos Warriors: no female models in range.
- Daemons: Daemonettes (followers of the god of sex; cause Fear, despite not looking scary).
- Orcs and Goblins: possibly no females in the species at all - in which case they naturally default to male...
- Vampire Counts: Lhamians (female vampires are seductresses, whereas male vampires are depicted with several different possible characteristics).
- Tomb Kings: no female models in range, not that you'd be able to tell anyway.
- Dwarfs: no female models in range.
- Lizardmen: no female models in range; arguably in a similar situation to the Orcs and Goblins, since they possibly don't reproduce like normal reptiles ("spawnings" seem few and far between, but I don't know the background that well), and they are lizardmen.
- Skaven: no female models in range; the background refers to "breeders", suggesting a highly subjugated female underclass. Of course, the Skaven are pretty horrible in every other way too, so this is hardly out of character or surprising for them.
- Ogre Kingdoms: one female model in range (depicted as a comedic 'housewife' with a rolling pin, pretending to be male with a false beard).
- Chaos Dwarfs: no female models in range.

I think that's all kind of disturbing when you look at it like that.

Dwarfs have female models in the range, haven't you seen the dwarf queen figure.

I linked to it in this very thread. I'm actually just talking about the current ranges though - the Wood Elves used to have a model for Queen Ariel, and there were the Handmaidens of whatever in the High Elf range. Oh, and I forgot the female spellsingers in the Wood Elf army (although, strangely, in the Army Book, the women are lowly Hero-level spellsingers, but the male model gets to be a might Lord-level Spellweaver) and the special character(s) riding the forest dragon, who are a set of sisters (kinda).

So, in conclusion, Elves are usually a lot better than the other armies as regards depicting female characters, but that might be because Elves are always kind of efemininite anyway, so it's very easy to integrate female characters into their background. And, even now, it's definitely gotten worse, not better over time.

And why are there no children and cows?
Because it's a WARgame!
Women, just like children and cows, don't go making war! The contrary can happen, but the basic position is : 15-55 years old men goes to war!

So : you can blame GW for a lack of imagination, not for sexism!

Elves and daemons don't go making war either, because neither of those things exist. It's a fantasy setting: they can do what they want, can't they? An army based on a historical culture (like the Empire and Bretonnia) can just about get away with "women don't fight in real wars", but it's a bit bizarre that entities made of pure magic would default to being male unless they serve the god of sex, and that the main fighting units of a race with such low sexual dimorphism as Elves have to be bloodthirsty nymphomaniacs.

EDIT: Also, there are cows in Warhammer anyay - they're called Minotaurs, Bull Centaurs and Great Tauruses, but that's neither here or there...

It's not the ratio so much as the fact that the very few female models are always defined by their relationship to sex and sexuality, or by their opposition to men that I find fault with. I never even thought about it before - it was only when I looked through the armies in the BRB that I realised how skewed it was.

Me? Do you ever refer to Orcs as "she" or "it"? No, you treat them as males. Same with Beastmen and Lizardmen. Everything else is clearly male or female.

Dragons, elves and magic is fine, but having women fighting would be a step too far in the direction of unrealistic?

Look, I'm not debating the ratios of male to female models - in the human races, at least, there is historical precedent and the non-human races usually have good reasons to not have women around. The only thing I'm taking issue with is that what few women there are in Warhammer are depicted in a way that their sexuality is someting to be reviled, or are defined solely by their relationship towards males.

It Doesn"t even matter guys .

Uh...well people do... they have two genders, like us, and zoologists and zoo-keepers and so on have to find out which is which.

Anyway, whatever. I just find the unfortunate implications of the female models in Warhammer sexist.