I’ve noticed that whenever a piece of fictional media is touted to be “female-led” in terms of the creative team, oftentimes the characters are very much stand-ins for the creators/writers and reflect them in ways that don’t necessarily fit the setting (assuming the setting is not based on a location from the creator’s childhood, which tends to be the case). Even for non-female led projects, it is pretty easy to identify when a character is written by a woman vs a man (Outer Worlds has a character named Parvati that was basically a self-insert that the writer, Kate Dollarhyde proudly bragged about, for example), as they all speak and think from a modern day lens, regardless of whether it is appropriate for the setting or for what the character should be.

Contrast this with male writers who are able to write men and women from different perspectives in a way that attempts to match the setting, and I can’t help but wonder if the ability of perspective-taking is a masculine trait, which could also explain why modern entertainment runs into the issue of incompatible character identities within a setting or very unimaginative characters and settings in general. I expect this to become increasingly common as more and more women (and men embracing feminine traits) enter entertainment industries across all mediums.

Though perhaps this is an issue of increasing mental illness across the board instead. A YouTube video by David Stewart about how terrible of an idea writing a character as genderless is brought up a different perspective, that increasing mental illness (autism in particular) could be a cause for the inability of people to identify with characters that don’t look like them (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-i_2kRnSsX0&pp=ygUNZGF2aWQgc3Rld2FydA%3D%3D)

I’m not sure whether there is a definitive explanation, maybe it is a combination of many different factors, but I think it isn’t unreasonable to theorize that women are less capable of perspective-taking compared to men in general.