Hi @nobyeni, good to see articles about this question :)
I think one part of the issue, is simply intellectual laziness in mainstream movies. Because characters usually serve a narrative purpose before being developed as human beings, it is easier to give female characters stereotyped roles to avoid creating cognitive dissonance in the audience.
And this is not even specific to gender, usually the decision to choose a non-white male actor to play a role is made because the character specifically needs to be a non-white male, which means that implicitly your character need a good reason that serves a purpose in the story to be a female/black/asian[...].
This is why we hear the term "strong" female characters so much (but one could say the same about emotional male characters i guess), because if they were not associated to a specific function, there would be no reason to make this character a female in the first place in the Hollywood paradigm.
More than strong females character i would just like to see more interesting characters played by females :)
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Yes, I think you absolutely nailed at least a large part of the problem. It shows how the norm is 'white male', and you're absolutely correct that the same mechanism works for many other types of minority figures... including people with a non-heterosexual sexual orientation, non-white people, those living in the so-called 'third world', etc.