How to Write Female Characters

Why is This Important?

It is a historical fact that women are not well represented in art, fiction, literature, or other cultural staples. Religious text often portrays us as weak and subserviant to our male counterparts, pop-culture continuously over sexualizes female characters past the point of anatomical ubsurdity, and history fails to recognize our achievments or advances in contrast to even the most mundane actions of men. Writing is no exception to this; the medieval fiction trope of a damsel in distress who needs a shining knight in armor to rescue her from the malicious intentions of a wrong-doing antagonist, is a cliche that to this day is used in far too many aspects of ficticious canon. The underdog is subjected to a trial of conflict, while the arm-candy waits safely on the sidelines, cheering them on. It is imperative that this does not remain the norm of how female characters are written; not only does it grossly undermine a hugely untapped iceberg of an audience, but it feeds the societal stigma that this is how women act, behave, and think.
This webpage will focus on how we as individuals can begin to change this, by irradicating the nuances and implementing the facts and evidence regarding the portayel of women, not just in pop-culture, but in daily life as well.

Translation: Woman are people too, here are the reasons why.

Common Mistakes

One of the main reasons behind why women are so innacurately personified in pop-culture is because the people who dominate these feilds (women make up only 11% of film directors, 9-11% of writers, and roughly 20% of actors. The statistics pertaining to white people and minorities are even worse) have all these pre-conceived notions as to how female and/or minority characters are supposed to act or behave. They have hundreds of personal biases that are then written into canon without ever acknowledging outside perspectives. The following is a list of these mistakes and inconsistencies:

• Women are either dainty and ridiculously incompetant or over the top psychomaniacs who loathe the existence of men and represent 'the sexism of feminists'. While it's not inherently bad to have characters like this, the problem arises when they are the only characters actually represented. These are not tropes that reflect the diversity of the population, merely two extremes of a spectrum blown way out of porportion. Women don't need men to solve their problems, and feminism is about equality, not misandry.
• That brings me to my next point; the life of your average person does not revolve around that of another unless they are A) a child, B) disabled and/or physically incapable of taking care of themselves, or C) in financial contract to someone they're being payed or coerced into working for. While most people have fit this rubric to some extent at some point in their lives, the greatest difference between men and women is that men are not expected to be confined to it. Women don't spend their days musing about the whims and fancies of their male constituants, we may muse about people -men, women, both, neither- but not solely one over the other. When female characters are written as being completely absorbed in the lives of those people around them, it pushes out their own individuality, focusing the story and the plot completely on the aspects of a male protagonist.
• The Adorkable Mysogyny of the Big Bang Theory
• Often when reading romance or teen fiction, I find the protagonist beginning to follow a pretty cliche character arc:
  After years of a mundane lifestyle, "insert name of female protagonist" had finally met the life changing man of her dreams. Her "characteristic that makes her special" attracted the mildly pedophilic attention of the hot alpha male, and now the rest of the sub-plot shall revolve around her attempting to fully capture his shallow love for her.
  

  Diversity and Characteristics

  
  

  Incorporation into the Story