Feminists

First, just to make things clear: I'm male, I've just completed the draft of my first novel though I've published a number of short stories (and seventeen non-fiction books) and my protagonist(s) are in the main female. The story is set later this century, the 2080s or thereabouts, and focuses on the rise of a new Queen of Scotland in a post oil, Steampunk-esque future.

The question you pose is an interesting one to me, because one of my goals is to make characters that don't align to form. Having said that, the main character is, deliberately, trained towards violence, and much of the story involves her learning how to tame and control that side of her, because she lives in a world where resources are scarce, structures are collapsing, and leadership is often brutish and capricious. She's not in fact all that terribly sympathetic a character - I had to create a secondary character, a female war correspondent turned partisan in the war for Cascadian Independence against the Free Republic of America (put the Freepers in their own country, then turn on fast forward for seven decades, and you get a pretty good idea how nasty they can get) to provide a sounding board, to show the protagonist's own self doubt and inner turmoil.

To get back to the thread here - finding the right balance for female characters is difficult, because I believe that women are more nuanced readers than men are in general, meaning that characters in general need to be more multifaceted for female readers than for male ones . Additionally, while I've written character based short stories before (where the emphasis really is on the characters and their interactions and the story is effectively a snapshot in time), the novel as a structure typically requires broader themes, especially in the realms of science fiction/fantasy, and these in turn tend to require that characters be more heroic or more villainous. In this case the protagonist is closer in spirit to Boudica or perhaps Grace O'Malley, and I find that she's more interesting when she's a strong type like this, but it comes at the risk of de-feminizing her.

So, in answer to your comments, I think that the goal of the writer should be to tell an entertaining story. Cliches and stereotypes can be used as devices if necessary, but overall they tend to be a lazy shortcut to character development, regardless of gender or circumstance.