Averting Real Women Don’t Wear Dresses

While the other answers cover options well, there are some "soft, yet badass" tropes writers can look at:

Embrace Girlishness

Agent Peacock

While this trope is more for male characters, it implies someone who is so completely confident in themselves, that they simply don't bother to look masculine.

To quote TV Tropes:

Their pretty looks and girly behaviour are an indicator of their prowess—they go through the exact same trials as the scarred, unshaven, macho-looking tough guys, and do it without messing their hair or breaking a nail.

Some characters use their femininity to maintain an element of surprise. (E.g. "No one suspects the flamingly camp hairdresser of being a super soldier.")

Loooking Physically Powerful

Girly Bruiser + Statuesque Stunner/Brawn Hilda:

While women don't build huge muscles, they can still look physically tough, with height or just mass. Unlike the chiseled 'amazonian' look, the statuesque stunner has the build of a basketball player.

Relies on Non-Physical Traits

Guile Hero(ine)

Judy Hopps of Zootopia is a straight example of this. Instead of being tougher, she tries to outwit other characters.

You can crank this up, make someone who is politically adept or manipulative. You can have a brilliant general who wins Sun Tzu or Machiavellian way, by deceiving the enemy. There's the Lex Luthor style villain, who builds layers of protection around themselves, such that even physically invincible enemies can't touch them.

Badass Pacifist

She can also someone who can completely defeat someone without any use of violence. She may get two warring factions to work together. She could also be similar to Hiccup of How to Train Your Dragon, who builds things and learns to swing the enemies to her side. In Fallout, an extremely charismatic and intelligent character can even convince the boss to kill himself.

Plucky Girl

When a man is determined, they are played as stubborn and relentless. But the feminine kind of relentless is in the form of optimism. This is Princess Poppy of Trolls, or Anna of Frozen. Even when she gets beaten down, she charges ahead, optimistic and idealistic.

She doesn't necessarily have to be sweet though. Vanellope of Wreck It Ralph is snarky doesn't avoid violence, but is still undeniably girlish.

The Dark Chick

The villain version of badass feminine is to subvert all the feminine qualities. She integrates herself well into the social ladder. She is empathic and understands people well. But she uses that skill to manipulate others and sow discord.

Often one of the big two bosses. Either the boss behind the boss, or the second in command. Again, there's an example from

Zootopia

Maternal Traits

Mama Bear

Probably as feminine as it gets - when someone they're protecting is being threatened, females of most species will rip apart the threat.

Team Mom or All-Loving Hero(ine)

The woman can be straight up nurturing. Either facing something hateful and countering it with love. Or they can be part of a rowdy group (e.g. Wendy of Peter Pan) and provide them with a feminine touch.

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Muz‭

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I don't understand the dilemma, just write it the way you want. Ultimately if you want a strong women that embraces her femininity, you are going to put her in a dress, have her pay attention to her grooming, skin, hair, makeup, etc, all the clichés of being a girly girl.

So she needs to express her strength and heroism in other ways. That isn't difficult, the hallmarks of heroism are persistence in the face of setbacks or injuries (physical or emotional), and deciding to do what is right even if it is frightening, dangerous, or even (especially) life-threatening. Heroism is in many ways altruistic self-sacrifice, helping others no matter the cost to themselves because they adhere to a higher principle. Oddly this is particularly applicable to anti-heroes that appear selfish or callous, but the redeeming quality that makes them a hero is ultimately some form of altruistic self-sacrifice.

You can write a girly-girl, but like the anti-hero, you just have to make sure the character will have the inner steel to do whatever it takes to do the right thing. To take the risks that must be taken to get it done, even if she fears it.

Her strength doesn't have to be physical. Even for male heroes, their strength is just one tool they use to express their will. She needs that will, courage to stand up to evil even if she fears it, even if she is bound to be hurt or injured or even killed. Even if she is certain she will be defeated. Even if the consequences of standing up are unimaginable. Courage and commitment to principle and self-sacrifice for love are human traits. Ask any woman that would literally risk death to save their child's life. These traits are not exclusive to male characters.

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Amadeus‭

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The initial problem was that writers (mostly, we assume, male) were writing female characters that were thinly imagined, stereotypical, and largely there only to reflect glory at the male protagonist, to serve as window dressing, or to advance the plot. They were based on male fantasies, not on portraits drawn from life. The ineffective solution was to write a new set of female characters that were just as thinly imagined, but were now based on a just-as-rigid inversion of traditional stereotypes. Most of these characters were still male fantasies, but just different ones.

The solution is to write better female characters, not just different ones --ones based on more than just your own personal image of what you'd like a woman to be.

Do you have close female friends? Have you done extensive reading of books by female authors? Have you had long conversations with women where you were mostly listening --and where they were talking about things important to them, not things important to you? Do you pay close attention to the women in your life? Do you really see them? Do you have female beta readers who you can trust to be honest? If not, it doesn't matter how many tropes you avoid or avert, you'll just be committing new offenses while avoiding the old ones.

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Chris Sunami‭

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"Strong" isn't always about having the biggest muscles, and not all conflicts are physical. (Likewise, giving a male character the ability to lift heavy objects doesn't mean he can't be whiny and annoying.)

There are plenty of traits you can use to make your character effective: the creativity and intelligence to find solutions, the foresight to plan ahead, the charisma and people skills to win friends and allies. But most importantly, she needs a backbone (and if she's the hero, a moral compass).

She doesn't need to be a martial arts expert, she just needs to be willing to take charge in a crisis. There's no reason people can't admire (real-life example I saw a couple of months ago) the manager's wife at the coffee shop, the one who's not afraid to throw out a crazy customer who's 1) about 2 feet taller than she is and 2) extremely angry about their coffee being made wrong... while her useless, whiny husband (personal motto: "I don't want trouble") hides in his office and pretends nothing's wrong. (Everyone there knows who's really in charge, and it's not the guy wearing the "Manager" tag.)

Personally, I'd recommend focusing on the "competent and reliable" part and less on trying to assign "traditional" gender traits. It's up to you, though.

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Evil Sparrow‭

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There is always an issue in literature with how strength, or any other human trait, is portrayed. In movies and TV in particular, that which is within can only be shown by external action. Books can look inward, but even so, representing qualities through action is still a major part of how books operate, especially in popular and genre works.

This creates a problem in the portrayal of strength in women. I'm going to get myself in trouble here, probably, but the characteristic strengths of men and women are different. To paint the matter with the broadest brush possible, strength in men manifests as daring; strength in women manifests as patience.

This is not to suggest that there are no daring women or that there are no patient men, simply that one it more commonly found in one than in the other. It makes evolutionary sense that it should be so. The male activities of war and the hunt (male because until very recently entirely dependent of physical strength) require moments of great daring. Those moments are of high intensity but short duration, and we all go get drunk afterwards. The female activities of caring for the children and household (while waiting in fear to see if the men return unharmed and successful from war or the hunt) require patience. (Children are charming in small to medium doses, but incredibly tedious if you have to spend many hours with them.)

Patience is just as important to human thriving as daring. Arguably, it has become more important over time as the need for acts of daring has decreased.

But when it comes to telling a story, and particularly to making a movie or TV show, acts of daring are easy to show, and acts of patience are not. If the stories of men have occupied a greater part of literature, it is because acts of daring -- typically though not exclusively male acts -- make a better story than acts of patience.

It is a common technique, in film in particular, to represent qualities and emotions through physical actions. Thus the daring of a stockbroker is dull and we seek a way to get them into a physical fight or chase to express their daring in more visual terms. In The Hunt for Red October, Jack Ryan is a CIA analyst who comes up with a daring analysis of the intentions of Marco Rameus. That is his essential contribution to the drama, but that does not make good TV, so the movie flies him out to an aircraft carrier, then to a sub, and finally has him in a gunfight with a Soviet saboteur in the missile room of the Red October: intellectual daring transformed into physical daring for the sake of drama.

This transference of qualities into action is bread and butter to the movies, and to books, to a lesser extent. It applies to showing the qualities of women as much as those of men. But it is hard to translate patience into action. So to portray "strong women" the movies often resort to having them perform physical acts of daring that are more typical of male strength than female.

Now one could make a good argument that in the modern world the need for daring is diminished and the need for patience is universal, so these distinct areas of strength are irrelevant now. But just because the need is no longer there does not mean the characteristic behavior is not there. Men are still bigger risk takers than women, for instance.

Some will argue that this is baked into our DNA and portraying it otherwise is mere propaganda. Others will argue that it is a mere social construct and that by portraying daring women in equal (or greater) proportion to daring men in media, we will undo that social construct and replace it by an equivalence of strengths between men and women in real life -- equalizing daring and patience in the behavior of both sexes.

This is the battlefront in the culture wars at the moment. There are land mines everywhere (placed by both sides). Be careful where you tread.

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Mark Baker‭

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Inanna's Journey and "girly" heroes

There are traditional "girly" heroes – often they take the pattern of Inanna's Journey. Rather than "leveling up" like a plucky male hero, Inanna's Journey is about maintaining wits/dignity/femininity while losing or descending in status. Once she's lost everything, she wins by proving her worth isn't about superficial material things but her strength of character (sometimes coded as undisguisable beauty or high breeding).

Cinderella has feminine hero traits of endurance and kindness. Her goal isn't to punch someone in the face but to experience a beautiful party – that's it, that's her desire. She doesn't expect anything more than that, it's the total opposite of cleaning fireplaces and scrubbing floors. She doesn't vow revenge on her oppressors (all female) or set out to infiltrate the monarchy. She still manages to have an enduring story because her story isn't really about magic shoes and dresses, it's about an underdog who has a desire. A lesser story would fulfill the desire then end, Cinderella gets a "Yes, But…" on her dream-come-true and the story continues. She appears to have no agency, but her girly moment upsets the whole country (compare to winning a tournament that upsets the whole country).

Cinderella is not a Feminist paradise. The antagonists fail, not because they violate Cinderella's value system of kindness and endurance, but because

the stepsisters' feet do not meet male-gaze expectations of femininity.

So there are negatives to the girly hero if the whole issue of gender/femininity is reduced to "looking nice in a dress".

Write better characters

I wrote a recap of the rules Samual R Delaney and Marilyn Hacker created for "better, more varied, more believable women characters": What is meant by “purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous” actions?

Through her experience as an editor, Hacker complained that female characters were restricted to another false dichotomy: Vicious Evil Bitches or Simps – limitations that arose because the (rare) female character was only in service to a male protagonist. The shallowness of their character design reflected how little they contributed. Simps were girly and fell in love with the protagonist. Bitches were – well, bitches – some kind of ineffectual antagonist, but often became Simps upon meeting him.

The false dichotomy is whether they were nice or mean, since they had the same reason for being in the story: to flatter the main character. They had no narrative agency or realistic motivations. It was easy to classify them as one or the other despite the crossover because there wasn't enough of a character to identify as anything else.

Diversify your female characters

Dress or Pants is a false dichotomy that doesn't say anything meaningful about g̶e̶n̶d̶e̶r̶ a character. The real issue is shallow tournament plots that climax in fisticuffs and action-movie banter. There just isn't a whole lot of variation or character depth there. The climax will be Hero confronts Villain, so those are the only characters that get any sort of arc to feel real.

The Feminist in me can't unsee that many male supporting characters are also "Simps and Bitches" just played out non-sexually. A sidekick is essentially a Simp following the hero around, while a frenemy (like Lancelot) starts confrontational but is won over by the hero's charisma or whatever – it's Bitch-to-Simp just without the skirt. It looks worse on female characters because of the lack of female protagonists, and a lack of other female characters in general.

Mix up the tropes you associate with girly-women and tomboys. I'll bet they suggest new characters that you recognize. For instance, which one loves animals (a feminine trait?) and what type of animal would each prefer? Which one has a closet full of shoes – is it somehow better if those shoes are high heels or the latest Air Jordans®? Which one is more physically competitive? Which one is more vain? Which one is more ambitious, or self-conscious? Which one works in an all-male industry, which one has considered their gender presentation and altered it to be accepted? For all of these I can imagine reality-based characters that go either way, and it forces me to re-think my own expectations. Pick something they wouldn't do, and make it work.

Write better stories

This is the whole point of Delaney's essay.

A realistically diverse population of women (in all age groups and financial tiers as suggested by Delaney and Hacker) would contextualize the character within a world of people, rather than fill the passenger seat as the sidekick/Simp and frenemy/Bitch to flatter a hero's journey, or more rare to substitute as the same old Hero with a slight cosmetic variation: a Ripley character.

The easiest thing to do is add more female characters so this one doesn't stand out as representational of all women who exist in the story – you'll need more than 2 or you end up with the false dichotomy again.

Lastly, here is the direct quote from Delaney's essay about the 3 actions that all characters need [my clarifications are in square brackets]:

Action is the clearest (and most commercial) way to present character. A good character of either sex must be shown performing purposeful actions (that further the plot), habitual actions (that particularly define her or him), and gratuitous actions (actions that imply a life beyond the limit of the fiction).

Simply because the way most books are plotted, the male characters regularly get to indulge in all three types of actions, however, if evil bitch, [her actions] are all purpose but no habit or gratuitous; if simp she is all gratuitous but no purpose or habit.

So the first task, after finding a plot that just does not require women in either of these ugly, banal, and boringly cliché grooves, is to make sure you portray your women characters clearly performing all three types of actions. (And, re: the purposeful actions, performing them successfully!)

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wetcircuit‭

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You dress the women however you like, and have them take whatever role they wish in their life. You pay them the same (or more) than their male counterparts for equal work, and most importantly, you have men and women alike look to women with respect. Ask their opinion. Listen to it and follow it. Consider their words. See the wisdom in them. If you open with something like this, a male MC reflecting on how he can always count on his cousin to have thought things through, more than anyone else he knows, then even if her name is Sissy and she speaks with a lisp and wears go-go boots and miniskirts and fishnet stockings, you'll be giving the reader something to think about. This sort of reflection on your male MC's part also makes him more interesting. And of course, your female viewpoint characters should also reflect on women positively, too.

If your characters see women as strong, so will you reader.

Also. Do a word count in your novel. See how many him and his vs. how many her and hers you have. Is it balanced? Or even female heavy? (females are often invisible. Go ahead--make it female heavy.) See how much dialog is from women vs men. Et cetera. Ask yourself if your women's dialog is declarative and authoritative, or more along the lines of a supplicant or servant. Who is asking the questions in the novel? Who is dispensing knowledge?

^^I recommend these sorts of metrics... because many male writers that I personally know stuff their novels full of men running around doing 'men things.' A couple women are tossed in as an afterthought, to take care of bearing children and looking nice. So go ahead--since you identify as a male writer, check your numbers.

The last thing you should worry about is how anyone dresses.

Also, a small thing up front, like a man taking on a small female-centric task, perhaps mending a tear in her skirt or some such, can go a long way to communicate the frame of your view of women.

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DPT‭

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