Quote: The “Middle Ground” for Strong Female Leaders

One of the most pressing problems for the producers of [Star Trek: Voyager] was how to represent a strong female leader of the future. For them, this became the ‘…constant search for the middle ground. Somewhere in between a simpering weakling and an aggressive Amazon warrior.’ The struggle that the writers, producers, and actor faced during these years was in trying to understand how a woman who was also a leader would behave four hundred years in the future when ‘there is definite gender equality’.

Michele A. Bowring, “Resistance is Not Futile: Liberating Captain Janeway from the Masculine-Feminine Dualism of Leadership”, Gender, Work and Organization 11.4 (2004).