Prior to the release of The Force Awakens, there was much speculation whether the new droid, BB-8, was male, female, or non-gendered. Both main droids from the previous films, R2-D2 and C-3PO, are male, and with a female-led seventh installment, the hope was that the popular new droid would also break tradition and be female. It turns out that isn’t the case.
If you’ve seen The Force Awakens, you’ll know that BB-8 is, in fact, male. Poe specifically refers to BB-8 as ‘he’ (“He’s a BB unit!”), and those who created him, the writers, wrote him as such, using male pronouns for BB-8 throughout the script. The head of The Force Awakens’s creature shop also confirmed that they were going back and forth on making BB-8 a male or female.
But why does this matter? It matters in the same way that having the main characters be a female and a male of color matters. That is, it matters a great deal.
Not all droids are gendered. Some are not assigned one at all, while others are assigned various programming. This means that the writers deliberately made the decision to give BB-8 a gender — a male gender — instead of leaving him as a robotic ‘it’.
As a viewer, you may not have even consciously realized that BB-8 was male. On the one hand, that’s okay. He is a robot, after all, his gender shouldn’t be something that stands out. On the other hand, it would have been more interesting, and certainly different, if BB-8 was incidentally female.
When a droid is gendered, it is given a personality and traits reflective of a male or a female gender. This process on its own is potentially problematic, especially if you’re of the mind that personality traits are not categorized by a gender, but the result of having a consciousness.
Let’s use an example. Leia is not inherently female. Yes, she is a girl. Yes, she is a princess. And yes, she is sexed up and used for eye-candy. But she displays ‘masculine’ traits too, like being headstrong, bossy, and composed. She’s not ‘a girl,’ she’s a rebel and a leader who happens to be a girl.
That is what we could have had in BB-8. We could have had a main droid that just happened to be female, with nothing specifically feminine about it. No female figure (although one could argue that BB-8 has curves), no female voice, and no ‘girly’ color. If Poe had pronounced BB-8 as “she” instead, the comment is made so casually that viewers probably wouldn’t have batted an eye. Nothing about the story would have changed, but the representation would have been there, and that representation is important.
To this day, there is still a stigma that boys only want male action figures or toys, and a great way to eliminate that would have been with a female BB-8. Every kid (and adult) wants a BB-8 toy, and if kids grew up with the conscious, or even subconscious, thought that BB-8 was a girl, that could do wonders for their perception of gender equality. Likewise, girls are just as eager as boys for these toys, and for them to be able to have female action figures growing up could do a lot for their perceptions of themselves. It could give them a confidence to not feel ashamed or embarrassed to like ‘boy’ things.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t any positives, though. Men are also stereotyped, and BB-8 is attributed non-masculine traits, despite being programmed as male. He’s compassionate, skittish, and quite dependent, traits not commonly associated with male characters. More progress would have been made had BB-8 been female, but at least as a male he is given something more than just a stereotype, much like the other male heroes in The Force Awakens.
Had BB-8 been female, we would have seen something different, something lacking in our current films. It shouldn’t be noteworthy to see a prominent female robot that isn’t sexualized, and is given as much character as male droids. By now it should be commonplace. Maybe it takes small steps, and maybe we have more pressing issues of representation in our films to deal with, but it was a simple solution. All they had to do was change a few pronouns.
There’s always the hope that in episode 8 they’ll introduce a prominent female droid. As it stands, Hux’s soldiers are coming under fire from Ren because Finn defected from the stormtroopers, so what if the First Order got a new soldier? What if a female assassin droid is introduced to hunt down those of the Resistance? A clone army was already suggested by Ren, but an assassin droid would be much more effective.
Or perhaps Finn will get his own, female, astromech droid. Since many fighter pilots died in episode 7, they’ll need new ones, and who better than Finn? Rey will be off Jedi training with Luke, so Finn, who is already a trained soldier, could be getting pilot training with Poe, thus getting his own droid copilot.
The Force Awakens definitely made progress with representation, but there’s still room to improve, and oddly enough, that improvement can come from robots.