I've seen a lot on this topic, with people constantly comparing male and female authors. While some would say that while males are not as good as writing character developments as females, others would say it's the opposite around.
I think that's just nonsense. There are so many examples out there with male authors that are just as good, if not better than female authors when writing character developments, and the same with female authors on writing plot stories.
Take Rick Riordan, for example. Everyone who knows me knows how much I worship his books. Percy Jackson was my childhood, and was a turning point for me as a reader, since it was his series that ultimately made me grew as a reader and show me this whole world of YA books. It's also his books that were the reason fantasy was still my go-to genre to this day. But even this doesn't excuse Percy's lack of character development.
It took me a long time to realize, and even a longer time to admit it, but the Percy Jackson books were not perfect. As I grew both as a reader and reviewer, I started to see the flaw. Percy never really changed. He didn't want to betray the gods, despite being treated like garbage, just like ever other Greek hero. But we never really see why he continued to stay loyal and "good". It's like, he's doing it just because he's supposed to, and it's the right thing to do...? In fact, Luke was the character with an actual arc and the one with maybe the best character development, not our protagonist. Luke's growth had everything Percy lacked. He had a legitimate reason to betray his friends, hate his father, hate the gods, and wish to see Olympus fall. It's because of his reasonable and understandable motive that made him a good character and villain. But we never see that with Percy. I would've really loved it to see him go dark sometime during the series, to see him doubt. And then see him realizes why he would do this. That would've been great. That "dark" park also cannot just be like, one sentence by the way.
But some females authors also aren't too well in that field. Despite Twilight's popularity, everyone admitted that Stephanie Meyer's characters didn't really have the best character depths or development.
(Do I really need to explain this one.)
There are also so many other examples. J.K Rowling, despite being a female author wrote excellent plots and an organized, interesting, and very well-written story. And despite PJATO's lack of character development, Riordan improved in that field drastically in the Heroes of Olympus series, where the characters are really growing up, therefore resulting the character traits to be more in depth.
Ultimately, it really doesn't matter if the author was male or female. That is what I'm trying to say. People shouldn't see a book, sees that it's by a male author, and immediately assume that it must have no romance (or a really bad one). People also shouldn't see a book written by a female author, and just go ahead and assume the book would have romance, and that just from that alone, it'll be better than the male author's book (romantic relationship wise).
