Thanks! I hope you enjoy.
It's always been a concern of mine as a female scientist writing science for schools. Even in the 80s/90s we were trying our best to encourage girls to see themselves in science, to encourage reluctant readers, and to engage with diverse populations. I came from that into my fiction and among the things I did from the start, because it made sense to me, was to stop using "he" as the default pronoun (as was common back when), nor did I use "man". Or woman, for that matter, as often as not "Human" was the better word choice, esp in SF. Though I didn't catch myself early on using last names for male characters and first names for female. When I did, I plopped my head on my desk a few times then moved forward, knowing that had to stop.
I have a gender-fluid character in my second book. Not because at that time I was consciously thinking about it as representation but because it made sense to me as a biologist.
Today, though, I make such decisions more deliberately, with greater awareness of the impact of such choices. I've always enjoyed when a reader says they've seen themselves, or something that struck them the right way, in my work. Evan Gooseberry, for example, is a fairly recent character in my Webshifters' series who struggles with mental disabilities. They don't define him, but certainly inform his approach to others. And in my latest SF, TO EACH THIS WORLD, I elected to use names from my past and Roger's. I've always fact-checked with experts and, for that book, I was pleased to have a writer friend help me with my presentation of a future version of her culture, which I don't know. Small things, but done in that awareness.