When you read fiction of any genre, do you tend to gravitate toward authors and/or main characters of your own gender, or not really and it’s fine either way?

In my reading, it seems about 50/50. Plenty of male and female authors I like, and usually there are a lot of major characters of both genders.

Statistically, women read novels more than men, but it varies by genre, eg romance vs military fiction. I guess part of why my reading is somewhere in the middle is I don’t read pure romance books or pure military books and the like, but rather read adventure/fantasy/sci-fi books that often have one or more romantic arcs, one or more action scenes including sometimes military scenes, heists, crimes, etc.

I listened to this podcast on how to write novels that men would like out of curiosity, and it was interesting. Basically, their thesis is that too much current writing advice is geared to writing for women, so male readers kind of get left out, but then authors pick up on that and write for men, and they do a lot of volume. I think that’s largely correct. However, I also found the advice a bit black and white, like that most women want character development and details of feelings while most men want achievement and details of things.

My assumption is that the majority of men and women readers want both of those things.

So what are your thoughts? Do you tend to gravitate toward authors and characters of your gender or not really?