Male default trope

[Holmbo]

I was wondering if there is a name for a certain trope in stories which I tend to think of as male default.
This is when characters in a story is male unless the story calls for them to be female. Like if the only women in a story are mothers, love interests or little sisters etc while there are many men in the story who could just as well be females and it wouldn't affect their role at all.
Does this occurrence have a name?

[Ettina]

I don't know. It's a major reason for failing the Bechdel test, though.  

[Holmbo]

On 2017-06-09 at 7:33 AM, Ettina said:

I don't know. It's a major reason for failing the Bechdel test, though.  

 

Yup, because then they are often just there as relation to the male character.

It doesn't even have to mean that the female characters are badly written. For example Harry Potter has great female characters but badly suffers from the Male default IMO.

[Alaska Native Manitou]

In western books & movies chief are universally male.  In reality, women were usually chiefs.

[mewix]

I think if a story fails the bechdel test it isn't necessarily bad.

Like dr who did but that was because the main character was male and overwhelmingly centered around that and monsters.

But I'd like to see more female lead films and such. Pixar seems to be mostly male character films, I guess disney does better tho there is a lot of the princessy stuff. With animal characters which a technically neutral a lot of people just assume them to be male unless they do a lot of stereotypically feminine behaviours or look overly feminised (breasts, skinny legs, small face etc)