What do we need the "female-characters" tag for?

Question

The review tool just prompted my to existence of the female-characters tag which currently has 8 questions. The question that supposedly created the tag borders on recommendation or list-request, but is still on topic (and decently upvoted due to its age, I suspect it would have a decent chance of getting closed as not constructive if it had been asked today). The rest of the questions merely ask about characters who's gender happens to be female.

All in all, do we really need this tag?
If you suggest that we do, then please provide a set of guidelines (or at least a draft) on how to use the tag, and if there should also be a male counterpart tag.

Answer 1

So long as the norm for so much fiction are male characters and protagonists, yes, there'll be a need for a female-characters. This is simply because anything that isn't a male makes these works distinctive, and adds cultural baggage that isn't present with male-lead works.

Similarly, I'd expect a female-authors (or maybe 'creators' instead of 'authors').

There are a couple of examples of questions that make use of this quality of having female characters:

• Was the nuanced treatment of Uhura a deliberate statement on civil rights and women's liberation?
• Was there a common influence for the characters Leela on Futurama and Aeryn on Farscape

And there's this one that comments on women in the US' Air Force:

• How could Samantha Carter's words about the Gulf War be true?

All of these are questions that arise from the previously-mentioned cultural baggage. And they point out some of the ways that female characters are a topic worthy of discussion specifically, which means they should have a tag.