s the publishing merely reflecting the audience and culture? Or is the publishing *producing* the audience and culture? I would say the answer is both.
There's certainly a mutual feedback loop. But Brackenbury's immediate assumption that the primary reason women haven't historically read S&S is its allegedly sexist content seems both reductionist and incomplete, and if he thinks all that's necessary to improve female S&S readership is to remove what he assumes is "sexist", I'm skeptical it'll have the results he hopes for.
I wouldn't classify them as technothrillers necessarily, but more technical sci-fi like Andy Weir's The Martian and Artemis along with Martha Wells' Murderbot novels have been popular with many women I know.
I don't doubt it, but
The Martian, at least, has a lot of character work to go along with the technical detail, and from what I've read about the
Murderbot series, those books also have a lot of introspection on the part of the protagonist. (I also can't help but wonder how much female liking for
The Martian is a product of Matt Damon starring in the movie -- apologies to the exceptions.)
The stuff that in my observation seldom catches womens' interest is the stuff where everything that isn't an in-depth examination of technology tends to be about fight scenes or politics. Larry Correia knew what he was doing when he included a love story as a key element of his first
Monster Hunter International book.
Have you read C.L. Moore's Jirel of Joiry stories? I feel they are pretty classic S&S, while also being written by and about a woman, with appeal to women readers.
I have, and you're right, they do entail a pretty heavy character and relationship emphasis in among the swordplay and eldritch weirdness. But I have to admit I think most modern "inclusivity" critics would still object to Jirel, given how her story turns on realizing that she's in love with the man who is the target of her blood vendetta; the trope "when a woman hates a man this badly, it means what she really feels for him is love" is considered highly problematic these days, and I'm not entirely sure I would even disagree.
It's also telling that stories like Jirel's, or the works of Tanith Lee and similar stuff, were far more often marketed under the genre label of "dark fantasy" than "sword & sorcery", despite involving a lot of the same tropes; it was what those authors did
differently from authors like Vance, Howard or Leiber -- the gothicism, the romance, the style -- that got them their own marketing technique. (And the "dark fantasy" label is also why the works of authors like Abercrombie, Erikson, and Bakker had to have the label "grimdark" attached to them for marketing purposes, because they in turn were very different from either predecessor label.)
I don't think it's any accident that Red Sonja is still more well-known as a pulp heroine than Jirel, despite having much less original work created for her by her original author ("Red" Sonya of Rogatino was actually only written by Howard once in a piece of historical fiction, "The Shadow of the Vulture"; it was Roy Thomas and Barry Smith who transposed her into the Hyborian Age for the
Conan comic series, which is where she became famous).