Too much males in the cast?

I am writing a sitcom and it turns out that most of the recurring characters are male (1 woman for 6 men) As I am not specifically targeting men, can it be problematical?

Why do you think you only created one female character? Unpack that and you might uncover something that you want to challenge yourself on.

Having a mostly-male cast isn't problematic in and of itself, necessarily, especially if it's justified in the story, but it is very likely indicative of SOMETHING. If you want to diversify your cast, diversify your thinking patterns.

Do you really want diversity or do you just want to avoid stepping on toes? Because there may be no way to achieve the latter without seriously watering down your creation.

If there is no justifiable reason for a gender disparity, then yeah, it could be a problem. Do you have a juastifiable reason?

It's "too many males", not "too much males".

Anyway, I like having a mixture, but purely because I can use "he" and "she" together with little awkwardness, instead of having to say "John/Charlie/latter/former/no the other one". That's only for written-in-words media though.

Typically when there're plenty of males, it's due to Men Are Generic, Women Are Special. That is, the writer writes characters as males unless there's a reason to be female. Such as Fanservice, or being able to stand around and show emotion without doing much, and still be loved. As you might've seen, it reinforces misogynist stereotypes.

So yea, I'll say it's good to have more female characters. You wouldn't have to deal with the sexist Unfortunate Implications of having a Token Female take all the weight, where every flaw is potentially a commentary on what all women are like. You wouldn't need to make your sole female character be 100% Perfect who does everything right because she can't have flaws.

It's as simple as taking a bunch of your male characters, and changing their pronouns (and which public toilets they go to). Not all of them have plots closely tied to them being male, I suppose?

edited 22nd Mar '16 10:45:48 PM by hellomoto

I agree that sometimes (oftentimes?) you can Gender Flip a character with no problems, other times it's not so easy.

Basically, if the character's role would not be impacted dramatically by changing to a female and you want to even up the gender balance, by all means make the change.

If the characters can't possibly be changed, due to any number of reasons, then that would hopefully show through in the work without making it seem sexist.

One of my works has more female characters on the protagonist side than males, another work has only two women and five men for most of the story.

In the first case, any but a few of the characters could be male or female with no major impact on the story and I decided it was better, story-wise, if most of them were women. If someone who mattered (publisher/editor) said that it needed more males, I could probably change a couple of the characters.

In the second case, due to the nature of the characters - origins and roles - they can't be changed to another gender without drastically altering who they are, their backstories, skills, outlooks on life...

I figured most characters aren't that dependent on their sex or gender to flesh them out. Exceptions would be along the lines of:

- Biology makes up a crucial part of the character's story. For example, "this female character's story is about how she dealt with pregnancy".

- Examination of gender roles is a crucial part of the character's story. For example, "this male character's story is about how he was wrongly accused of rape, in a society where females are seen as weak and in need of protection from the male perverts". Note how I mentioned the society's relevant views, because in this case gender matters within context of how other people perceive the character.

There're still many storylines that aren't so dependent on gender. Parent-child relationship, learning how to work in a store or pick up a sport, other things where gender-flips are possible without having to change much.

Exactly.

In my examples, one story is about a team of professional bodyguards - most of whom are women - and the setting and plot are both such that they could be either sex with no issues.

In the second case, two are soldiers from societies where "War is men's work", another is a sexist prick whose attitude to women provides a significant amount of conflict in the story, another male comes from an egalitarian society and provides the other side of the conflict, two are strong, independent women who constantly disprove the sexist pricks rantings and the last (male) is from the sexist prick's society to show that they're not all as extreme as the sexist prick.

I'm very much of the opinion "write whatever you want, and if people don't like it, they don't have to read it". That being said, if it bothers you, I agree with what others are saying- check each character individually, see if them being male actually has any effect on the story, and then consider changing a couple of them. Another option (depending on how far along your story is at this point) is to just add in a few more female characters (but avoid creating pointless characters that are only there to fill out some sort of quota) or fleshing out the ones you already have more. I (and I'd venture most readers) would rather see one well-written, interesting female character and the rest of the cast male than a cast full of stereotypes and one-dimensional women.

Humerously enough, I actually have the opposite problem- I tend to create Improbably Female Casts a lot and sometimes have to change female characters to males to fix it. I know I don't have to, but it annoys me personally to have a large imbalance in gender of cast members in my own writing, in much the same way I dislike having more than one of a single class in my party in rpgs.

If male characters get gender-flipped into female ones, that should provide fleshed-out, multi-dimensional female characters... well, more like fleshed-out, multi-dimensional characters who happen to be female (when previously they happened to be male).

Checking if your characters being male has any impact on the story can help check for accidental gender stereotyping, which can then be corrected.

Target the fujoshi demographic. Problem solved. :P

But no, seriously, write what you want. If it really does bug you, personally, that there's too much dong in your cast, of course you should change it, but if the only concern you have is what other people will think of you, don't worry about it. The sort of people who would get offended at you because of the number games they can play with your casts' genital counts would likely find something to get salty about no matter how many women you wrote into it.

Come to think of it, the lack of females issue could be more of a Tropes in Aggregate thing.

Still, I ask that you take a look. You could be unintentionally stereotyping or pigeonholing the female characters, accidentally implying certain sexist ides without even realizing it.

Saying that we're 'salty' about the 'genitals' of the characters immediately dismisses all the issues society and the media has had with sexism and forcing genders into specific 'roles'. Men Are Tough and Women Are Delicate are omnipresent tropes, which should say something about how enduring sexism is.

Then again, I don't know what your characters are like, nor do I know the story they're in.

edited 27th Mar '16 6:22:18 PM by hellomoto