I don't know... I think the situation with regard to female characters in SF has actually gotten a lot better at the literary high end over the past 30 years or so, especially from some female authors such as, say, Nancy Kress and Connie Willis (just to name a couple off the top of my head), but also from some male ones, though somebody is always going to accuse them of getting it wrong.
There's a bit of a catch-22, in that people writing female characters who don't act stereotypically girly are accused of writing them as "men in disguise". And for many decades, any story with a strong female character in it, even (perhaps especially) if it was by a woman, was going to have to be a feminist issue story in which the character was reacting to stereotypes, thus defining her by her gender in that way (see Joanna Russ): perhaps a worthy effort, but constrained. Ursula Le Guin is a good example of a writer who concentrated on that at one time, but then, I think, largely evolved beyond it.
There are people who never learn. In the last interview I read about the subject with Stanislaw Lem, he said that his straight SF was often devoid of female characters because introducing them would automatically introduce a sexual element that would be extraneous to the story. It's a strange, old notion, which I've heard propounded elsewhere: that men are sort of the default sex, and sex itself is associated inextricably with the presence of women, so you can eliminate it by eliminating the female characters. (I guess Lem never read any Samuel R. Delany.)
no subject
There's a bit of a catch-22, in that people writing female characters who don't act stereotypically girly are accused of writing them as "men in disguise". And for many decades, any story with a strong female character in it, even (perhaps especially) if it was by a woman, was going to have to be a feminist issue story in which the character was reacting to stereotypes, thus defining her by her gender in that way (see Joanna Russ): perhaps a worthy effort, but constrained. Ursula Le Guin is a good example of a writer who concentrated on that at one time, but then, I think, largely evolved beyond it.
There are people who never learn. In the last interview I read about the subject with Stanislaw Lem, he said that his straight SF was often devoid of female characters because introducing them would automatically introduce a sexual element that would be extraneous to the story. It's a strange, old notion, which I've heard propounded elsewhere: that men are sort of the default sex, and sex itself is associated inextricably with the presence of women, so you can eliminate it by eliminating the female characters. (I guess Lem never read any Samuel R. Delany.)