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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/25178
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

If you would like to immediately disprove your friend about the fact that female readers prefer a protagonist that is an ordinary person, I'll refer you to the works of [Jane Austen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Austen), which are favored by female readers, incredibly popular and about the landed gentry in the late 18th/early 19th century. Personally I wouldn't call any of the protagonists "ordinary people".

I think it's possible that your friend is getting confused about male/female readers and male/female characters. An author does certainly need to understand how males and females are different if they're planning on writing about them, but no more than they would need to know about what it's like to live in poverty if the character lives in poverty, or what it's like to live in India if the character is Indian. It's simply part of good character building.

So it all comes down to how realistic the characters are, and how much the readers relate to them. It's obviously easier to relate to a protagonist that is more similar to oneself (the entire genre of young adult fiction is centered around that premise) but that doesn't mean that people cannot understand or will refuse to read books targeted outside their demographic. A lot of adults read Harry Potter. Sure they were probably children once, so can at least relate to the character based on their memories of childhood, but the majority of women were never teenage boys yet still enjoy reading it.

As for the claim about males preferring heroes and females preferring ordinary people, off the top of my head I would think that most fiction leans towards the characters fitting that stereotype. There are plenty more protagonists that are both heroes and men, but if anyone thinks that a hero can't be a woman then [Katniss Everdeen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunger_Games) would like to have a word.

I'm going to go ahead and assume based on the pronouns in your question that your friend is not and has never been a female, so is probably unqualified to comment on what women generally look for in their books. Like I said, based on all of the books that have ever been written it may be safe to assume that writers tend to write their books following your friend's exact type of thinking, so it's at least unsurprising that he made the claim.

However, if 2016 has proven anything so far, it's that things that have generally worked in the past don't necessarily mean people will like it in the future.

Original score: 7