At some point in the past, I noticed that I had a strong tendency to make NPCs male, even though there wasn’t any good story or setting-specific reason to do so. From gods to villains to random shopkeepers - most of these were assigned male without me even realizing that I have been doing it.
Thus, I started to assign genders by the roll of a dice - and I am fairly pleased with the results as this made the world significantly more diverse.
How about you? Have you noticed any similar biases in your own NPCs - and if so, what did you do about this?
I’m currently GMing Cyberpunk (because I can’t convince my group to play Shadowrun), and there are a couple of modules that use gender politics as part of their hook and background. I don’t want to mess with those because I feel like it adds to the credibility of the world.
Overall, I tend to make mostly female NPCs. To avoid that, I assign gender based on who they will appear with. If the leader of a faction is female, their sidekick is male. When male driver 1 passes the group to driver 2, driver 2 is female.