Science fiction has long been a male dominated genre of writing. Over time, more female writers have begun authoring stories with characters with different genders and sexualities. Could it be that the lessening of gender discrimination in recent years has made the science fiction community a safer space?
Women writing stories with agency were rare in science fiction until the 1960’s because of gender discrimination in our society. This gender discrimination made it so that most female writers before the mid-century had to use gender ambiguous names such as C.L Moore and Leigh Brackett. This makes sense because if the aspects of science fiction itself were preventing women from having any sort of agency in science fiction then they would still be the same. The 1960s inspired lots of change and after that point more female science fiction writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin and Joanna Russ wrote science fiction stories that questioned gender roles. If anything the plots, settings, and major concerns should make it easier to create meaningful women characters because in a fictional universe you can do anything with your characters and the only thing from stopping writers from creating good female characters is our society itself.
Nowadays there is still discrimination in the science fiction community although it is not as bad as it once was. Many people still stereotype science fiction written by women with female characters as not having much to do with “hard sciences” and more focused on social sciences. The lessening of gender discrimination in the science fiction community has led to more stories about characters with varied gender identities and sexualities. This is setting the genre apart from other genres of books and it shows that the aspects of science fiction were not holding female and non-binary writers back from writing, it was how unwelcoming society was before of writers that were not men.
The future of science of fiction could be even more diverse with gender and sexuality than it is now.
