I know two women who are beginning to dabble in the game (a fucking record I think). One wants to go Imperial Guard and the other is beginning to buy Dark Eldar stuff. Catering to women at least a tiny God damn bit can do nothing but add to their playerbase. Something they need to think about doing, seeing as they're not getting any new ones.
While I don't play WH or WH40K myself (anymore), I'm still active in a player group - I just only concern myself with the board and tabletop games. Miniatures and CCGs were too time- and money-intensive for me to keep up.
Anyway, I see lots of women flocking in these days. 8 or 10 years ago, there were 2 or 3 girls in the group, and they were all girlfriend-of's. Now, women are the majority of the group. However, they stick almost exclusively to board and tabletop RPG games for the moment. There're some CCGs that appeal to them, but even so, more despite than because of mechanics. Miniatures? Nope. None. (I assume you're not counting Blood Bowl as miniatures - that's a board game
)
I'm convinced that catering more to them and having more female characters etc available (and NOT in the stereotypical nurse or witch roles) would help a bit. On the other hand, I think it'll be at least another 10 or 20 years before we've evolved enough culturally.
To explain myself, just look at RTSs, TBSs, and sports games on the computer and console. Heck, even war-like board games. They're all thematically similar to miniature games (most are war games after all), and they all have distinctly more male (I really can't use the word masculine here, sorry
) player bases than board games based more on construction, cooperation, or other things. I don't want to be the misogynist claiming "women only like games like the Sims", because that's very much not true. However, women in general are less interested in war and direct combat games, and seem to be more into the managerial aspects of games (compare and contrast user base numbers for Fifa vs Fifa Manager - the second has a LOT more female fans, despite being pretty much a number cruncher) and cooperation. I'm not claiming this as some sort of biological imperative - we've all been conditioned from a very early age into certain roles in society.
So, I don't think women would suddenly flock to WH or WH40K if there were some more feminine characters. I
do think that, with women exploring more and more parts of geek subculture and being more and more accepted in it, some types of misogynist nerds - and the ones afraid of women, etc - are looking for ever new subsubgroups to cluster around in and band together. Jocks can go play football with no women around; nerds used to be able to play a computer game or a role playing game without women - the latter isn't true anymore. If Game Workshop wants to cater to the misogynist dipshit minority group, that's their choice - it'll just mean WH(40K) will lose relevance as a game as women become an ever increasing part of nerd culture.
