"If suddenly every woman in Osirion became as smart and capable and likely to be magic and useful at work as the men, would it change anything?"

" - sure it would. Docks would hire them, they don't even care if whoever they're hiring is human. They could defend themselves, it'd be safe for them to go out whenever it's safe for men to. No one'd want to hit his wife, if she could hit him right back just as hard."

"Men sometimes hit their lovers or their husbands. Admittedly much less often."

"If every woman in Osirion suddenly became as smart as the men - but nobody announced this - how would you notice? And let's not assume they're any physically stronger. Drow men are physically stronger and that hasn't collapsed the whole business. Likelihood of being magic is confounded all to hell, I assume you've got equal numbers of sorcerers but you don't send your girls to wizard school and who knows how Abadar's picking clerics but it's actually not so skewed overseas."

"Yeah, smarter by itself wouldn't do anything."

"Not really any reason to think it's not true already."

"It's probably close. More men become wizards even in Avistan but that might be the thing that makes most adventurers men, which isn't intelligence and might be reasonably characterized as the opposite."

"The need of an Owl's to the face."

"There's a known explanation for that which comes from the most important underlying difference between men and women, actually. Uh, you know how traits are heritable -"

"Sure."

"So let's say that inclination to do risky high-return things is heritable. A man who becomes an adventurer, in Avistan, can father, what, a hundred children? They go to whorehouses constantly, they have woman lovers in every city, they leave families behind when they get bored - they're going to have lots of children with those same traits that made them like that. This isn't true for women, women adventurers probably have fewer children than women who stay at home and get married. This goes on long enough and you get men loving risk and women mostly not, both of them just doing the things their grandparents did."

"In Osirion being an adventurer doesn't much increase how many children you have."

"Right. We're trying to engineer a race of more responsible men."

"Why aren't the hundreds of daughters of the profligately procreative doing as their fathers do?"

"I think people mostly inherit traits from their same-sex parent but I'm not actually an expert on this, just read a paper on it once. A fairly speculative paper though it had some interesting things on its side, like orphaned children from different immigrant groups having different propensities to lawlessness."

"Ooh, interesting test population."

"All kinds of money for that sort of research these days."

"Funny how all the ones you ever hear about confirm that we're great and everyone else is terrible."

"They weren't even arguing that the Avistani thing was terrible! Just that it produced men who would take more risks than women. Arguably even good, if you want high level casters in your society."

"I think finding research studies the most appealing shape of evidence is charming even if all the research is very corrupt."

"A lot of it's under the guidance of the new pharaoh. I wonder if he was a mathematician or something, before."

"What, so, once blended with Abadar you got the church but with more fondness for research studies?"

"I mean, I think it implies that he retained any of his previous characteristics, or nothing would've changed at all."

"I guess, yeah."

"People do imply it matters that Abadar have lots of choices so he probably isn't just straight-up possessing folks to puppet the nation."