At some point in the past, I noticed that I had a strong tendency to make NPCs male, even though there wasn't any good story or setting-specific reason to do so. From gods to villains to random shopkeepers - most of these were assigned male without me even realizing that I have been doing it.
Thus, I started to assign genders by the roll of a dice - and I am fairly pleased with the results as this made the world significantly more diverse.
How about you? Have you noticed any similar biases in your own NPCs - and if so, what did you do about this?
I have a random NPC generator tables I made. I have a 1d8 for gender (1 is androgynous female and 8 is androgynous Male, the rest are male and female). I tend to have certain races more androgynous and gender bending than others. I also have height, clothes, hair, eyes and body. Similar tables with some personality traits.
For race I have a 1d100 table for my major regions. The 1d100 let's me get small percentages of rarer species and allows me to create groups. So for the current area 70% are from the region with 60% being the top three races and the remaining 10% being atypical. The remaining 30% are broken down by nearby regions and foreigners. This lets me customize each section and roll on subsections of the table if I have to.
I always race, mostly roll gender and everything else is optional. The gender, appearance, and personality tables are universal and I have made few race tables for the campaign. They are useful tools to have created and to use