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 did this in a novel I wrote, actually. I assigned TLA ‘names’ based on their job (ENG, PIL, etc), and any time a gender would normally be referenced in the text I used XXX - both for easy searching. I got about 70% of the way through when my beta readers rebelled - they absolutely HAD TO KNOW what gender everybody was. Sigh.
But by this time the characters’ personalities and speech patterns were well established, so I flipped a coin for each one, and continued onward. I’ll probably do this again some day and just ignore the beta readers.