Breakfast Topic: Does gender influence class choice?

This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW.com.

A while back I ran a survey for a course I was taking and I enlisted the help of the WoW community. One of the more interesting results that came out of the survey was what classes the different genders played. From most played to least played, the classes were:

• Men paladin, druid, shaman, warrior, death knight, priest, mage, hunter, rogue, and then warlock

• Women druid, priest, paladin, shaman, hunter, mage, warlock, death knight, warrior, and then rogue

What you might notice is that men prefer the three-role hybrids, then the two-role hybrids, then the pure DPS classes. For women, the order of popularity is classes that can heal, classes that do ranged DPS, then the pure melee classes. The results of the survey would seem to imply that women and men have entirely different ways of approaching class choice. Men seem to judge a class based upon how much utility it provides or how flexible it is, whereas women seem to be more focused on what they'll be doing and where they'll be doing it.

All of this is very interesting, but I would like to know how things were different during different times in WoW. What was the distribution before dual spec existed? What about late BC? Early BC? Late vanilla? What will the distribution be like in Cataclysm? In Cataclysm, many classes will be opening up to races that couldn't play them before, and the worgen and goblins will each have their class preferences. How will that affect what people play? Furthermore, many classes will become easier or more interesting to level because of the changes to how our talent trees work and how the leveling experiences are designed.

I'll leave you with some simple questions. What is it about your classes that appeals to you? Have you always played these characters? Or did you play other classes in the past? And are you male or female?

(Oh, I received an A on the project -- so thanks to everyone who helped!)

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