Found this and wanted to share some advice from Geena Davis - let's discuss!
"Go through the projects you're already working on and change a bunch of the character's names to women's names. With one stroke you've created some colorful unstereotypical female characters that might turn out to be even more interesting now that they've had a gender switch."
2 people like this
Last week's Scriptnotes podcast touches on the same topic, Episode #346, Changing the Defaults, April 17, 2018: "John August sits down with screenwriter Christina Hodson to discuss race, gender, and representation in Hollywood, and how screenwriters can help correct the status quo with the one thing they can control: the words on the page." It's a great discussion on how screenwriters can help change the automatic default, say, for secondary or background characters who are open to being anyone but systemically are cast or assumed to be male and white. They also discuss Geena Davis and her simple yet effective suggestion to better represent and reflect the real world on screen. https://johnaugust.com/2018/changing-the-defaults. ;)
While my only accomplishments are in my own crooked mind, I found that one of my dramas forced me to have a Female lead. I wasn't looking for it, but it just made it obvious to the story.