I don't have much data on what D&D is like with groups of different gender mixtures. At the time, we considered agricultural forays and many stops for "okay, now we make tea" to be things that probably didn't happen when boys played.

My (normally all-male) groups have had a few forays into "make don't break," and many forays into "the DM wants us to do X? Y is the most important thing in the world right now."

In general, something I talk about with players is asking them how much of their ideal session is spent on combat, and how much is spent on role-playing. You get people who prefer 100% combat, and people who prefer 100% roleplaying, and seating those people at the same table is a bad idea. (I tend to go for >80% roleplaying myself, these days.) I would surprised if there weren't a male skew towards combat and a female skew towards roleplaying, but I also expect both distributions to be positive everywhere.

There's also a wealth of tabletop roleplaying systems out there these days, such that if you find your group prefers to mostly roleplay, you should play a game designed for mostly roleplay, rather than D&D, which is basically designed for >95% combat.

Addendum: approximately 900 people have now told me that this kind of thing happened in their groups too and is not a girl thing. Point taken.

Sounds like we've successfully reduced the inferential distance a bit, eh? ;)

At the time, we considered agricultural forays and many stops for "okay, now we make tea" to be things that probably didn't happen when boys played.

FWIW, I don't know about tea, but the kind of plot derailing you describe happens about ten times per session in our current all-male roleplaying group. Some GMs are better at handling it than others...

At the time, we considered agricultural forays and many stops for "okay, now we make tea" to be things that probably didn't happen when boys played.

FWIW, this does not match my experience. But then, most of my gaming has been in mixed-sex groups.