alixtii | Writing Female Characters (Reply)

By "usage" I mean all the times I used a fe/male character tag on a fic at A03. If I use a character in three different fics, that counts as three uses; there's no weighting for the length of the fic or the size of the role the character plays in it. There were a total of 240 uses of male character tags and 408 of female character tags. (Go here to see how many times my more popular character tags each got used. Also the breakdown by genre.) N.B. Faith still isn't being counted in these numbers, for reasons discussed in the previous archive stats post.

If we look only at the number of (canonical, in the Archive tag wrangler sense of "canonical") characters of each gender (of the two genders I've written) I've written (i.e., Dawn counts only once instead of 51 times), then we get this chart:

I've written 130 different female characters (that get their own A03 tag) and 88 male. Which means the average (mean) female character I've written appears in 3.14 (just under pi, actually) fics, and the average male character appears in 2.75. So I write 48% more female characters than male characters, and I write them 14% more often.

And here's a graph showing which POVs I used. Bar graph instead of a pie chart because some fics use more than one, or none, of these tags, so I can't rightfully show it as percentages: