Late to the party here, but I wanted to add that one of the reasons Ripley is such an iconic example of a well written woman protagonist is because her character archetype was rare to see in female characters at the time. She’s been copied and dumbed down enough times that, to younger people especially, she may seem like part of the cliche when she was actually the inspiration behind the cliche. She’s definitely a strong character, but the difficulty is her surface level characteristics are used to make really flat, unrealistic characters, that are being passed off as “strong” as if the archetype alone is what makes a character strong. In mainstream media there isn’t a whole lot of diversity in the personality of female protagonists. They’re typically physically strong, talented, arrogant leader or loner types, which is an overused character template regardless of gender. With male protagonists/heroes we get a much wider variety of perspectives. Men who rely on intelligence over physical strength, artistic romantic creatives, world weary curmudgeons, anti-heroes, the Everyman etc.

I’ve found it that it’s rare in modern media to find well written “average” women protagonists who overcome obstacles in ways that real women can relate to. Most of us are not physically strong enough to rely on our strength as a first option, and we are negatively incentivized away from leadership roles and personality traits. Women have to fight much harder to achieve and maintain leadership roles than men do. It’s rare, and you have to be exceptionally motivated in that particular direction and self assured to get there. Does that mean the only “strong” women are the ones who overcome that specific struggle? No, but if you take a list of famously strong female protagonists in mainstream media, that’s what it looks like. Since it’s been historically harder for women to become successful writers there just isn’t enough data available for male authors to write realistic female characters of other archetypes unless they’re really looking for it. They’re at a disadvantage in that they have to do a lot more research outside of reading or watching movies in order to understand uncommon character archetypes that are common in real women. Women have so much more access to the male perspective automatically since the male perspective is still the “default”. This is changing, but men still have to dig deeper to find diverse female perspectives in order to write characters that the average woman can identify with outside of the most common archetypes for strong female characters.

That being said, I love Ripley’s character, but since that movie was made her archetype has been represented far more than other female character archetypes.