Ok, back? Good. Now, a little context: a few weeks ago, a friend posted the first two of those on Facebook, which led to a very interesting discussion in the comments. I kept thinking about the issues raised in these (and the other two, which were linked off the others), and they helped me define the issues I saw with Astrid in the How to Train Your Dragon movies, as described in the post linked above.
Because here's the thing: the articles are right. Strong Female Characters as they currently appear all too often in media are a flawed and ultimately unhelpful way to depict gender relations. At the same time, though, Strong Female Characters arose as an attempt to solve these problems, and to replace the even more flawed roles assigned to women before this new archetype was created. And I suspect that the vast majority of content creators who include Strong Female Characters in their works are doing so out of a sincere desire to do right by women, whether for ideological or market-driven reasons, because they have been told again and again about the need to avoid the problematic tropes about women that have been floating around ever since people first started using vocal grunts to signify abstract concepts. While their efforts are not entirely successful and demonstrate a certain lack of awareness and sensitivity on their parts, it's not really fair to demonize the creators who do so, unless they work for Disney, in which case for crying out loud, they should know better by now.
I also think that the debate about gender equity in fiction is too often approached from a perspective of things NOT to do. And to be fair, there are an awful lot of things on that list. But I wonder sometimes if the problem is that we spend all our time telling creators they're doing it wrong and not enough giving suggestions on doing it right. The Bechdel test is one of the more helpful offerings; it offers a basic, easy-to-follow checklist for creators to run through to see if they're doing it right. However, even the Bechdel test doesn't give terribly specific guidance about how to go about fixing a problem once diagnosed, and lord knows it's possible to write a thoroughly sexist and unenlightened story that passes the test; Bechdel is a helpful benchmark, but I think its primary value is as a statistical evaluation of fiction as a whole rather than a litmus test for individual works. And so creators - the test was originally and remains most often applied to movies, the vast majority of which are created by men - know that they AREN'T supposed to make women wimpy and submissive and reliant on men, but actual guidance on what they SHOULD be doing is sparse. And so they make female characters unwimpy and unsubmissive and (at least at first) unreliant on men, and if they're really daring, they try to create TWO such women, but they're still approaching the female sex as a list of don'ts rather than a list of dos.
So let's see if we can fix that.
While this topic has been on my mind for a few weeks, what actually inspired me to write this post was thinking about some of my own writing and the strengths and weaknesses that I've since recognized therein.
When I was in high school, I started work on a novel based on a short story/novella I wrote in 11th grade. It was an epic fantasy (of course), involving angels and gods and what it means to worship or be worshiped (one of my favorite series at the time was His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman, which was very relevant to the religious angst endemic to my late teens). After a while, it languished. Then in college, I had a series of epiphanies about what the story needed to be and set out on a complete rewrite of the outline, having first painstakingly charted the physical rules of the universe (I was on the tail end of a Brandon Sanderson binge). I did quite a bit of writing, including one frenetic long weekend in which I turned out over a hundred pages; a file with a draft of the first third or so of the story is still on my drives. But again, it languished.
If I had to pick a single main reason why I've not touched the story in years, it would be that I started writing it as a way to deal with issues that were very pressing for me in high school and early college and that I have largely resolved or stopped worrying about since; however, the factor that actually broke my momentum and put a stop to writing was, of all things, Middlemarch, which I read for one of my classes. Although it's about as un-epic-fantasy as a novel can get, I was amazed at how tightly plotted and satisfying a conclusion Elliot crafted without any of the magic systems or government conspiracies or even diverse cultures that usually populate my reading list. What she had - and used with surgical precision - was an iron-hard grasp of the strengths and weaknesses of all her characters and the finesse to weave them all together to create a resolution to all the major character arcs and relationships that was not only believable; it was inevitable. And her female characters were just as numerous, just as complex, and just as integral to the workings of that tightly-knitted plot as any of her male characters.
And as I read this, I realized that I couldn't continue with my novel as I had it imagined. Because while it had all the clever worldbuilding and ancient mysteries and intricate plot twists that an author's heart could desire, it was utterly lacking in the kind of emotional and relational sophistication that Elliot made her bread and butter. In particular, I had all of five female characters envisioned for this epic (probably multi-volume) work; three to be killed off near the beginning, one who died a full ten years before the story begins and doesn't actually do anything throughout, and one still lurking at the conceptual level (no name or personality traits to speak of) to be a romantic interest for one of the male leads in the latter half of the story. And that was all. It would not be until a few years later that I learned about the Bechdel test, but had I known it then, I would have realized at once that I was failing it miserably, which is even less acceptable in a giant (probably multivolume) novel than it is in a movie. And so I shelved the work, and one thing led to another, and it has stayed on the shelf ever since.
I don't feel guilty for writing the plot I did as a teenager; I still think it has a lot to recommend it. (The writing, at least of the early portion I recently reviewed, not so much) But I recognize now that it was very much a story by and for a teenage male, because not only did women not play a major role in the story, but I was trying to tell a story in which women had no role to play. And after reading Middlemarch, in which without the interactions of male and female, there was no story, I knew I had to do better.
But here I ran into trouble, and I'm pretty sure this is where so many other creators - filmmakers in particular - get stuck. Because recognizing that something is missing is one thing; fixing that absence, in a way that is graceful and doesn't detract from the other artistic merits of your work, is a whole other kettle of worms. In my case, my story was about one man going on a lengthy, dangerous journey in a quasi-medieval setting under apocalyptic conditions, with frequent and militant encounters with a patriarchal political structure and their armies and an even more patriarchal church, none of which provide women easy access to authority, and to add in characters without authority - or at least some sort of agency to affect the plot - simply for the purpose of an interaction quota would amount to fluff. Obviously, a woman holding authority in such a setting is far from unprecedented, either in fantasy or even history (Jeanne d'Arc, looking at you), but such cases were extremely rare, and if one is too casual in throwing around warrior women and iconoclast princesses, it starts feeling like a D&D fan fiction where every drow is a chaotic good rebel against his kind. I didn't necessarily think it out this clearly four years ago, but I knew something was missing, and I knew I didn't know the right way to fix it, and so the story was shelved.
It is at this juncture, I think, that so many creators go awry. They have an idea for a story. It might be dumb, it might be clever, but whatever its other qualities, it's about a manly man or manly men doing manly things like blowing up terrorists or investigating murders or winning car races. Women, if they exist at all, are portrayed in terms of their relationships to the main character and how they affect him (the girlfriend who needs to be rescued or gives him the 'you can do it' pep talk, the wife killed to inspire vengeance, etc.), and that's a problem, and they get that. So, they add a female character (almost always only one, or at least only one named) who can keep up or even at the beginning of the story surpass the male characters. And this is great! The problem is, they're still telling the same story. The Strong Female Character was added for reasons adjunct to the actual story, and so of course they have no role to play in its resolution. Whether suddenly turned helpless by use of the standard female grab area or sidelined with a 'this is your battle' speech, in some way the strong female character will be eased out of the way so that the manly men can get along with whatever the creator always intended for the manly men to do in the first place. The problem was never the number of female characters, or even the relative wimpyness or badassery of those female characters; the problem was that the creator was trying to tell a story in which female characters had no purpose. (Note that falling in love with the hero, even if it's a relationship that has a major impact on his perspective and characterization (and it very rarely does), is not in itself a purpose sufficient to support an entire main character in the story; I'll talk a bit more about that later on.)
Which is not to say that a female character has to take over; the main character still has to do main character things. But there's a world of difference between a Strong Female Character who gets overwhelmed and is unable to help him in the end, and a strong female character who accomplishes some critical task (holding off the pursuing robots long enough for him to defuse the bomb, for example, or creating a distraction so that the main character can slip a note to the right person during a recess in the courtroom, or whatever.) There's also a huge difference between a SFC whose goals entirely coincide with the hero's and one with her own priorities toward which she makes concrete progress over the course of his story.
But the key question for me remains, why is this character needed to complete the story? If there isn't an answer, your character, Strong and Female or otherwise, is dead weight and will be perceived as such.
There are a couple ways to solve this problem. The simplest, I think, is to look at the story you're telling and make a conscious decision that this is not a story that requires female characters to tell, and then stick to your guns. This is particularly applicable if you're writing about one of the many historical situations in which women were strictly excluded; I'm pretty sure I've seen at least one John Wayne movie set on a naval vessel in WWII that didn't even bother trying to include female representation, and one of the best mystery novels I've ever read, The Name of the Rose, is set in a medieval monastery and has exactly one female character, who speaks all of two or three times in a language that nobody else even understands. If a creator is confident in the vision and the story he's telling with only characters of the less fair sex, then I say, far better to go for it than to try to shoehorn in women at the expense of the story that needs to be told.
This isn't a freebie pass or one-size-fits-all solution, though. Simply being set in a male-dominated environment is not enough to justify going fully masculine; even in the most testosterone-fueled war story, it's important to be aware that women exist in war zones as well (which is one thing the Illiad, for all its myriad challenges from a modern gender studies perspective, does depict very clearly). The male-dominated cast works so well in The Name of the Rose not just because it's set in a monastery populated only by men, but because the entire book is an exploration and celebration of the monastic life and worldview and tradition; another book series set in a similarly monastic setting, the Cadfael novels by Ellis Peters, is much more interested in the interactions between the monastic community and the greater society and so brings the monks into contact with both male and female laypeople much more than in the first example. Only if I were telling a story set not just in a male-dominated setting, but in some degree of enforced isolation (so not just the crew of a Napoleonic warship, but said crew after being shipwrecked on a deserted island), and only if I were telling a story concerned almost exclusively with the relationships and society fostered in that exclusively male setting (as is The Name of the Rose) would I consider going all the way monogender in a story.
(And while male underrepresentation in fiction is hardly going to be the cause du jour for many years to come, I would consider the same criteria to be useful to a writer considering an all-female cast.)
The second most convenient option I've considered is just do a gender swap or two; pick a previously male character and make him female, leaving his role in the plot intact. This has the benefit of ensuring that the woman/girl has at least something to do and can lead to some very unexpected and intriguing results, especially when an existing story is reimagined with females in formerly male roles or vice versa, as seen in all manner of Rule 63 artwork and longer works ranging from the commercial (the assorted Barbie movies) to the artistic (making Konrad female in Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing). However, it does have some drawbacks. For one thing, it just flat-out won't work in some circumstances, especially in the aforementioned historical or patriarchal fantasy settings; one can't simply make one of the monks in The Name of the Rose female; that's actually exactly how monasteries DON'T work. This is also tricky for main characters in particular because of the different ways different ages and genders interact; if a creator is interested in creating and exploring a surrogate father-son relationship, changing the younger character to a woman completely changes that dynamic. If the new paradigm is equally compelling, by all means, go for it, but I wouldn't want to expect creators to completely scrap the relationship dynamics they were interested in modeling just for the sake of a gender quota. While this certainly can be a solution to gender imbalances in many stories, and is probably worth doing as a thought experiment in any story, I wouldn't want to rely on it to solve any story conundrum on its own.
The third and trickiest approach to solving a gender imbalance in a story is, I think, the best. A creator can spend all the time in the world trying to find ways to make women fit into (or reasonably be completely excluded from) their male-dominated story, and they might even succeed, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that the more important question to ask is, 'why were you trying to tell a story without women in the first place?' Because, as should come as no surprise to any reader, women are everywhere; in fact, there's just about as many of them as there are men, and they tend to have a major impact on the causes, effects and solutions of nearly every problem imaginable. Even in historical or patriarchal settings, women did not need to be Jeanne d'Arc to have or exercise influence; Cersei Lannister is a great example of a woman who could get into all sorts of mischief without once having to strap on a shield. Trying to tell the story of A Song of Ice and Fire without the contributions made by female characters in entirely non-combatant and societally believable roles would make no sense; this is one of the many reasons that Martin is simply the best in the world at what he does. And so, if a creator is trying to tell a story that entirely depends on manly men doing manly things, the next step should really be to ask, what do women have to add to this story? That's what I've settled upon as my preferred approach to gender equity in storytelling; there needs to be reasonably parity between the sexes, of course, but not to fill a quota; instead, only add to your story female characters who make it a better story, and until you have found and incorporated those characters, your story simply isn't finished.
Note that adding female characters that improve the story is not just a matter of making the story more complicated in order to create more masculine-coded roles to be filled by women; if that's your approach, it would be simpler (although still flawed) to just swap out male characters you've already created. If your female character acts just like a man, talks just like a man and is treated by everyone else just like a man, you might as well just admit that she's a man.
This is a tricky tightrope, because I absolutely do believe that women can and do perform every task, feel every emotion and hold every perspective that men do, and vice versa. The jury is still conflicted on nature and nurture, but it's pretty clear that any biological disposition to so-called male and female traits is only a guideline, not a hard-and-fast law applicable to all individuals. And yet whether natured or nurtured, men and women in every culture that I'm aware of HAVE developed different emotional and behavioural and relational traits. While it's certainly conceivable to assemble a cast entirely of highly masculine women or highly feminine men, unless your story explicitly focuses on gender-nonconformist communities, doing so strains credulity and undermines the case for seeking gender equity in fiction in the first place. Suggesting that the only way for women to affect proceedings in your world is to strap on a shield or a mech suit and stab/blow things up with the rest of the dudes is not the way to suggest you've given careful thought to the social roles and talents of women.
On the other hand, pandering to gender stereotypes - for example by making all female characters simpering and vain and all male characters macho and violent - does nobody any favors. The key lies in recognizing the ways that authentic men and women relate to each other and how authentic men and women tend to approach problems and concepts differently. While these dynamics have changed enormously from century to century and culture to culture, I'm not aware of any culture where it was normal for men to treat women as 'just one of the dudes' or for women to treat men as 'one of the girls'. And while in many such cultures the men might think this means that they are the ones who can and should make all the decisions, I'm also not aware of any culture where a woman of wit and determination could not find ways to influence the world around her, and THOSE are the ways that women in even the most sexist setting can and should be influencing the outcome of the plot.
And to go back in the other direction (like I said, tightrope), none of that should be construed as saying female characters should not be seen doing male-coded things, because, you know, Jeanne d'Arc. The problem only arises if that is the ONLY type of female character depicted, or if it is implicitly or explicitly suggested that doing male-coded things is the ONLY way that female characters can exercise agency and advance the plot.
A particularly tricky subset of the authentic relationships between genders I mentioned above is romance, which is practically de rigeur for most genres. On the one hand, romantic affection is one of the most universal variations of male-female interactions (assuming heterosexuality, which most works do). On the other hand, one could reasonably assume based on most fiction that any man and woman who happen to interact during a stressful or unexpected situation will inevitably develop the hots for each other, which is not at all born out by real life. For myself, I strongly believe that even straight women and men are perfectly capable of having deeply personal platonic relationships that will not inevitably turn into romance (although my own dating life hasn't quite worked out that way ...), but I also think that nearly any story that attempts to examine how a character's emotional life affects his or her engagement with the world (which is to say, any good one) can only be enriched by engaging that character in strongly felt interpersonal relationships, of which romantic is the most common option. So as long as characters are not being added with the primary purpose of being a love interest, and have believable in-universe motivations and goals independent of their interactions with the protagonists, I don't have a particular problem with the statistically unlikely prevalence of romance in fiction.
In any case, those are three different ways to assess and solve story problems arising from gender imbalance. While I think the third option is probably the best and certainly the most reliable, all three are valid approaches to gender imbalances in fiction and can work in some or all stories. I'm sure there are others; just as there are many causes to the overall problem of imbalanced gender representations, there will be many solutions. But this is what I think we need to provide to creators when we castigate them for failing to make women a helpful and meaningful part of their stories: a toolbox of approaches or mindsets or techniques to change the numerous unhelpful ways that women are portrayed in fiction.
So that's how I'm approaching my old novel with the angels, which I'm dusting off and starting to work on for the first time in four years. The old draft will be scrapped entirely; the outline will undergo sustained beatings until it gets better; and I've returned to the history and cosmology of the world with an eye to answer questions that never before occurred to me to ask - questions about inheritance and family structure and legal traditions that are critically important to the characters trying to resolve the problems I'm throwing at them, and which are also, not coincidentally, questions about the ways in which women in patriarchal societies are most likely to exercise some control over those societies. Already several characters I'd never met before have developed roles and relationships, and obstacles that had never occurred to me - and should have - have arisen that the entirely male cast of the original draft are singularly ill-suited to overcoming. Good times.
Even as I resume work, I don't know if this story will ever reach a finished state; my newfound desire to explore the relationships - including, but not limited to, romantic - that motivate these characters might not be enough to keep me engaged in a world created to make sense of issues I had as a religiously angsty 20-year-old. But even if I wind up shelving this one again, it will only be to one day replace it with another story, and this time, I'm quite confident that I will not be 300 pages in before it occurs to me to ask myself, 'how could women make this story better?'
I don't feel guilty for writing the plot I did as a teenager; I still think it has a lot to recommend it. (The writing, at least of the early portion I recently reviewed, not so much) But I recognize now that it was very much a story by and for a teenage male, because not only did women not play a major role in the story, but I was trying to tell a story in which women had no role to play. And after reading Middlemarch, in which without the interactions of male and female, there was no story, I knew I had to do better.
But here I ran into trouble, and I'm pretty sure this is where so many other creators - filmmakers in particular - get stuck. Because recognizing that something is missing is one thing; fixing that absence, in a way that is graceful and doesn't detract from the other artistic merits of your work, is a whole other kettle of worms. In my case, my story was about one man going on a lengthy, dangerous journey in a quasi-medieval setting under apocalyptic conditions, with frequent and militant encounters with a patriarchal political structure and their armies and an even more patriarchal church, none of which provide women easy access to authority, and to add in characters without authority - or at least some sort of agency to affect the plot - simply for the purpose of an interaction quota would amount to fluff. Obviously, a woman holding authority in such a setting is far from unprecedented, either in fantasy or even history (Jeanne d'Arc, looking at you), but such cases were extremely rare, and if one is too casual in throwing around warrior women and iconoclast princesses, it starts feeling like a D&D fan fiction where every drow is a chaotic good rebel against his kind. I didn't necessarily think it out this clearly four years ago, but I knew something was missing, and I knew I didn't know the right way to fix it, and so the story was shelved.
It is at this juncture, I think, that so many creators go awry. They have an idea for a story. It might be dumb, it might be clever, but whatever its other qualities, it's about a manly man or manly men doing manly things like blowing up terrorists or investigating murders or winning car races. Women, if they exist at all, are portrayed in terms of their relationships to the main character and how they affect him (the girlfriend who needs to be rescued or gives him the 'you can do it' pep talk, the wife killed to inspire vengeance, etc.), and that's a problem, and they get that. So, they add a female character (almost always only one, or at least only one named) who can keep up or even at the beginning of the story surpass the male characters. And this is great! The problem is, they're still telling the same story. The Strong Female Character was added for reasons adjunct to the actual story, and so of course they have no role to play in its resolution. Whether suddenly turned helpless by use of the standard female grab area or sidelined with a 'this is your battle' speech, in some way the strong female character will be eased out of the way so that the manly men can get along with whatever the creator always intended for the manly men to do in the first place. The problem was never the number of female characters, or even the relative wimpyness or badassery of those female characters; the problem was that the creator was trying to tell a story in which female characters had no purpose. (Note that falling in love with the hero, even if it's a relationship that has a major impact on his perspective and characterization (and it very rarely does), is not in itself a purpose sufficient to support an entire main character in the story; I'll talk a bit more about that later on.)
Which is not to say that a female character has to take over; the main character still has to do main character things. But there's a world of difference between a Strong Female Character who gets overwhelmed and is unable to help him in the end, and a strong female character who accomplishes some critical task (holding off the pursuing robots long enough for him to defuse the bomb, for example, or creating a distraction so that the main character can slip a note to the right person during a recess in the courtroom, or whatever.) There's also a huge difference between a SFC whose goals entirely coincide with the hero's and one with her own priorities toward which she makes concrete progress over the course of his story.
But the key question for me remains, why is this character needed to complete the story? If there isn't an answer, your character, Strong and Female or otherwise, is dead weight and will be perceived as such.
***
There are a couple ways to solve this problem. The simplest, I think, is to look at the story you're telling and make a conscious decision that this is not a story that requires female characters to tell, and then stick to your guns. This is particularly applicable if you're writing about one of the many historical situations in which women were strictly excluded; I'm pretty sure I've seen at least one John Wayne movie set on a naval vessel in WWII that didn't even bother trying to include female representation, and one of the best mystery novels I've ever read, The Name of the Rose, is set in a medieval monastery and has exactly one female character, who speaks all of two or three times in a language that nobody else even understands. If a creator is confident in the vision and the story he's telling with only characters of the less fair sex, then I say, far better to go for it than to try to shoehorn in women at the expense of the story that needs to be told.
This isn't a freebie pass or one-size-fits-all solution, though. Simply being set in a male-dominated environment is not enough to justify going fully masculine; even in the most testosterone-fueled war story, it's important to be aware that women exist in war zones as well (which is one thing the Illiad, for all its myriad challenges from a modern gender studies perspective, does depict very clearly). The male-dominated cast works so well in The Name of the Rose not just because it's set in a monastery populated only by men, but because the entire book is an exploration and celebration of the monastic life and worldview and tradition; another book series set in a similarly monastic setting, the Cadfael novels by Ellis Peters, is much more interested in the interactions between the monastic community and the greater society and so brings the monks into contact with both male and female laypeople much more than in the first example. Only if I were telling a story set not just in a male-dominated setting, but in some degree of enforced isolation (so not just the crew of a Napoleonic warship, but said crew after being shipwrecked on a deserted island), and only if I were telling a story concerned almost exclusively with the relationships and society fostered in that exclusively male setting (as is The Name of the Rose) would I consider going all the way monogender in a story.
(And while male underrepresentation in fiction is hardly going to be the cause du jour for many years to come, I would consider the same criteria to be useful to a writer considering an all-female cast.)
The second most convenient option I've considered is just do a gender swap or two; pick a previously male character and make him female, leaving his role in the plot intact. This has the benefit of ensuring that the woman/girl has at least something to do and can lead to some very unexpected and intriguing results, especially when an existing story is reimagined with females in formerly male roles or vice versa, as seen in all manner of Rule 63 artwork and longer works ranging from the commercial (the assorted Barbie movies) to the artistic (making Konrad female in Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing). However, it does have some drawbacks. For one thing, it just flat-out won't work in some circumstances, especially in the aforementioned historical or patriarchal fantasy settings; one can't simply make one of the monks in The Name of the Rose female; that's actually exactly how monasteries DON'T work. This is also tricky for main characters in particular because of the different ways different ages and genders interact; if a creator is interested in creating and exploring a surrogate father-son relationship, changing the younger character to a woman completely changes that dynamic. If the new paradigm is equally compelling, by all means, go for it, but I wouldn't want to expect creators to completely scrap the relationship dynamics they were interested in modeling just for the sake of a gender quota. While this certainly can be a solution to gender imbalances in many stories, and is probably worth doing as a thought experiment in any story, I wouldn't want to rely on it to solve any story conundrum on its own.
The third and trickiest approach to solving a gender imbalance in a story is, I think, the best. A creator can spend all the time in the world trying to find ways to make women fit into (or reasonably be completely excluded from) their male-dominated story, and they might even succeed, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that the more important question to ask is, 'why were you trying to tell a story without women in the first place?' Because, as should come as no surprise to any reader, women are everywhere; in fact, there's just about as many of them as there are men, and they tend to have a major impact on the causes, effects and solutions of nearly every problem imaginable. Even in historical or patriarchal settings, women did not need to be Jeanne d'Arc to have or exercise influence; Cersei Lannister is a great example of a woman who could get into all sorts of mischief without once having to strap on a shield. Trying to tell the story of A Song of Ice and Fire without the contributions made by female characters in entirely non-combatant and societally believable roles would make no sense; this is one of the many reasons that Martin is simply the best in the world at what he does. And so, if a creator is trying to tell a story that entirely depends on manly men doing manly things, the next step should really be to ask, what do women have to add to this story? That's what I've settled upon as my preferred approach to gender equity in storytelling; there needs to be reasonably parity between the sexes, of course, but not to fill a quota; instead, only add to your story female characters who make it a better story, and until you have found and incorporated those characters, your story simply isn't finished.
Note that adding female characters that improve the story is not just a matter of making the story more complicated in order to create more masculine-coded roles to be filled by women; if that's your approach, it would be simpler (although still flawed) to just swap out male characters you've already created. If your female character acts just like a man, talks just like a man and is treated by everyone else just like a man, you might as well just admit that she's a man.
This is a tricky tightrope, because I absolutely do believe that women can and do perform every task, feel every emotion and hold every perspective that men do, and vice versa. The jury is still conflicted on nature and nurture, but it's pretty clear that any biological disposition to so-called male and female traits is only a guideline, not a hard-and-fast law applicable to all individuals. And yet whether natured or nurtured, men and women in every culture that I'm aware of HAVE developed different emotional and behavioural and relational traits. While it's certainly conceivable to assemble a cast entirely of highly masculine women or highly feminine men, unless your story explicitly focuses on gender-nonconformist communities, doing so strains credulity and undermines the case for seeking gender equity in fiction in the first place. Suggesting that the only way for women to affect proceedings in your world is to strap on a shield or a mech suit and stab/blow things up with the rest of the dudes is not the way to suggest you've given careful thought to the social roles and talents of women.
On the other hand, pandering to gender stereotypes - for example by making all female characters simpering and vain and all male characters macho and violent - does nobody any favors. The key lies in recognizing the ways that authentic men and women relate to each other and how authentic men and women tend to approach problems and concepts differently. While these dynamics have changed enormously from century to century and culture to culture, I'm not aware of any culture where it was normal for men to treat women as 'just one of the dudes' or for women to treat men as 'one of the girls'. And while in many such cultures the men might think this means that they are the ones who can and should make all the decisions, I'm also not aware of any culture where a woman of wit and determination could not find ways to influence the world around her, and THOSE are the ways that women in even the most sexist setting can and should be influencing the outcome of the plot.
And to go back in the other direction (like I said, tightrope), none of that should be construed as saying female characters should not be seen doing male-coded things, because, you know, Jeanne d'Arc. The problem only arises if that is the ONLY type of female character depicted, or if it is implicitly or explicitly suggested that doing male-coded things is the ONLY way that female characters can exercise agency and advance the plot.
A particularly tricky subset of the authentic relationships between genders I mentioned above is romance, which is practically de rigeur for most genres. On the one hand, romantic affection is one of the most universal variations of male-female interactions (assuming heterosexuality, which most works do). On the other hand, one could reasonably assume based on most fiction that any man and woman who happen to interact during a stressful or unexpected situation will inevitably develop the hots for each other, which is not at all born out by real life. For myself, I strongly believe that even straight women and men are perfectly capable of having deeply personal platonic relationships that will not inevitably turn into romance (although my own dating life hasn't quite worked out that way ...), but I also think that nearly any story that attempts to examine how a character's emotional life affects his or her engagement with the world (which is to say, any good one) can only be enriched by engaging that character in strongly felt interpersonal relationships, of which romantic is the most common option. So as long as characters are not being added with the primary purpose of being a love interest, and have believable in-universe motivations and goals independent of their interactions with the protagonists, I don't have a particular problem with the statistically unlikely prevalence of romance in fiction.
***
Even as I resume work, I don't know if this story will ever reach a finished state; my newfound desire to explore the relationships - including, but not limited to, romantic - that motivate these characters might not be enough to keep me engaged in a world created to make sense of issues I had as a religiously angsty 20-year-old. But even if I wind up shelving this one again, it will only be to one day replace it with another story, and this time, I'm quite confident that I will not be 300 pages in before it occurs to me to ask myself, 'how could women make this story better?'
For some reason this seems like an appropriate place to share these:
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