By Susan/Miranda
If the book you’re reading now didn’t have an author’s name on the cover, could you tell if it was written by a woman, or a man?
This is a heated question in my house, with both a male and a female reader (aka my DH and me) ready to jump into the fray. I maintain that in too many books written by men, the female characters are perfunctory stereotypes at best, placekeepers of the worst sort: the hero’s overbearing mother, his girlfriend of the moment, his young daughter in jeopardy, the sweet old lady downstairs who’s murdered, the vixen of a villainess.
We’re not just discussing manly genre books (otherwise locally known as “Dad’s boom-booms”), either. 
There are plenty of well-regarded male writers, past and present, who seem to falter when it comes to creating women worthy of their heroes. Too often there’s a hollowness to the heroine, a lack of emotional depth that, as a female reader, I instantly sense. Somehow these women just don’t behave right.
But turn-around’s fair play, and my DH says exactly the same thing about many of the books I like by women authors (including, alas, a number of my writer-friends). He’ll concede that the writing’s first-rate, the plot’s well-paced, the research is everything you’d want to 
support the story, but the hero –– well, he has no use at all for the heroes. He claims they’re too sensitive, too thoughtful, too reflective, too downright talky, to be real. Worse, he says that the harder a female writer tries to write a tough-guy, the more false the poor shmoo will ring to a male readers ears.
As a writer, I know it’s not easy to create ANY character, regardless of the gender. I’ve lived my whole life among menfolk, but I still can’t begin to know all the laws of their particular planet. Whenever (and writing romance, you know it’s not often) I hear from a male reader, praising something that one of my heros did or thought, I’m overjoyed, and relieved, too. It’s a tricky challenge to make work. One of the things I like best about writing novels in the first person (like King's Favorite and Duchess) is that I can stay inside my heroine’s head, and leave the hero to think whatever “Man Show” thoughts he may choose, unassisted by me. 
But back to my reader-role. I’ll hasten to say that this gender-bias doesn’t hold true for every book. There ARE plenty of wonderful male characters written by women, and women written by men. But there are also too many of the other kind to be ignored.
I’m not talking about women writing behind a male pseudonym –– Georges-Sand-syndrome –– to gain respect from the literary establishment. Though, sadly, things haven’t changed that much since Marianne’s time, either, not if you count the number of favorable reviews for male-written books in the Sunday New York Times Review of Books versus the number by women-writers. If you’re a woman writing macho-commando books, you still better abbreviate your name into genderless initials if you want to sell in an equally-macho market, just as the handful of male romance 
writers publish their love stories under female pen-names.
No, I’m speaking as reader expressing certain, ahem, frustrations. Would Inman have fought through so much to return home only to die on his doorstep if Cold Mountain had been written by a woman? Wouldn’t a woman writer have given the namesake of Memoirs of Geisha a bit more emotional depth to balance out the fascinating history that filled the rest of the book? Couldn’t Horatio Hornblower have found true love with a woman who was less of a man than the weather-beaten Lady Barbara? And wasn’t there some way that Love Story could have remained a love story without killing off poor Jenny and leaving Oliver so pathetically adrift?
What about you? Have you ever read a book where the writer betrayed her or his own gender by a
lack of empathy or understanding for the characters playing on the other team? Have you ever wondered how differently a book would have been written by a man –– or a woman? Or do you think this is all a bunch o’ hooey, and there’s no difference at all?