William Gibson on women in his world

William Gibson on writing about women:

"TVP: Does working through a female protagonist help provide that kind of distance?

WG: I don't know why I do that except that they're better company for me. In the months that it takes me, I have to live with these characters for really a long time in considerable depth. I find it's really a lot more pleasant for me if at least half of them are female. I don't know why that is, but I certainly found it fairly odd. It probably had something to do with some sort of unexamined model I have of what constitutes humanity. Come to think of it, some of it might be that traditionally, the science fiction I grew up with, a lot of which had been written in the 1940's and before, was arguably very much a male universe. And a lot of people assumed science fiction to be a fundamentally male genre."

fairly odd, indeed.