Occasionally you'll see a writer question like "how do you write women?"
And the answer that's given is often "WOMEN ARE PEOPLE".
I just ... I don't think that this is a good answer? It's true, but I think it's not that likely to help men convincingly write women unless they're starting from "women are magical unicorn creatures". Which, yeah, sure, some men are starting from there, and "just write a person" might actually improve their situation.
I think a lot of men fail with "ah, just switch the pronouns". They write women whose socialization and life history is unacknowledged. Women who have not suffered harassment, discrimination, male attention, etc. Women who wear makeup but don't ever think about the makeup. They get the texture of the emotions wrong. They get the history wrong.
And for a single character, I would argue that sometimes this just doesn't matter. An individual can go against the grain, and have their own quirks and foibles. You can have a woman who wishes that she were a man. Though ... a woman who wishes that she were a man because men have the "better" gender role would be quite distinct from a man, right? In terms of her internal motivations and backstory and stuff? All people live within a society, and are shaped by that, and by their socialization, and their gender role, and their reaction to all that.
So for writing women, you have to know what it's like to grow up as a woman, to be seen as a woman, taught as a woman, all that stuff. You can and should do research on these things! You should read stuff that women have written about what it's like to be a written, how it feels to be looked at by men, what female friendships are like, what women are physically and emotionally attracted to, the particular texture of fear and anxiety that women often have around men in certain situations, the emotional labor that women are expected to do, all that and more. There's a lot to it! And as with most research, most of it will not make it to the page, it'll be a thing that you think about, and then it becomes part of the background texture of the character.
And yes, this is the same approach that you take to all character writing, whenever you're trying to write someone who isn't yourself, when you have to think hard about internal experiences of other people and marshal an understanding of the circumstances of their life.
So I think "women are people" can serve that role, and at a really basic level, writing women is like writing any character with traits you don't have, but there's also a bunch of specific stuff that naturally would come up during research and talking to women that could help a lot more than just "idk, do your own research, just make sure they're not unicorn fairies".
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