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Chromosome Casting

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Top: 12 Angry Men. Bottom: 8 Women.

Works which feature only male named characters or only female named characters, but not both. As the examples below demonstrate, most works like this tend towards the former. Commonplace in works in which the setting would necessitate such a casting choice: prison dramas, war films, sports dramas, etc. However, if employed in settings in which one would expect a gender diverse cast it can come off as incongruous (in some cases to the point of raising Unfortunate Implications). Depending on the choice of gender, it can serve as either the logical extreme of The Bechdel Test, or The Smurfette Principle minus the Smurfette herself.

Note that all of the characters have to be explicitly male or female to qualify for this trope: the presence of named characters with an Ambiguous Gender, characters with Bizarre Alien Sexes, or simply individuals with non-binary gender identities automatically disqualify a work from being an example of this trope.note 

Transgender characters count as the gender they identify as (despite the name of the trope), as do Crossdresser characters, even if they may present as another gender. It also doesn't matter if the characters are played by an actor of another gender (as in many Theater productions): what matters is that the characters are all of one gender.

See also Sliding Scale of Gender Inequality, which concerns how the different genders are represented in media (this trope fits for the two extremes of that scale), Gendercide (when the reason of featuring only one gender was caused by in-universe Depopulation Bomb), Improbably Female Cast (female-dominated casts in unlikely situations), The Smurfette Principle (when a single female character is featured in an otherwise all-male cast as a sop to gender equality), and The One Guy (the much less common Spear Counterpart). Contrast Gender-Equal Ensemble, which averts this trope completely. Compare Monochrome Casting, the equivalent of this trope in race/ethnicity. Common for works with a Minimalist Cast.

Note: This trope can account for edge cases, such as when the only characters of the opposite sex are background characters, extras, Mooks etc., but have no especial bearing on the plot or significant role in the work.

noreallife

Examples:

    open/close all folders 

Male Only:

    Anime & Manga 
  • Akagi has zero women onscreen in the entire show.
  • Used in Ai no Kusabi to justify its Cast Full of Gay.
  • While the series as a whole doesn't qualify, the very long and mostly self-contained Namek arc of Dragon Ball Z does due to taking place on a One-Gender Race planet that's been invaded by an Evil Army. Bulma puts in a brief appearance at the beginning and again at the end, but that's it. Everyone else is a (male) Space Pirate, a member of a One-Gender Race of men, or has the name "Goku", "Krillin", or "Gohan." Even characters glimpsed in flashbacks (Katas's son and Bardock) and the Greek Chorus that we cut away to on Kaio's planet occasionally (Kaio, Yamcha, Tenshinhan, and Chaozu) are all male.
  • Both Crows and Worst by Hiroshi Takahashi, seinen manga about inter-school fighting and manly friendship, feature no women whomsoever aside from occasional mentions (one of the main characters has no less than 6 girlfriends).
  • The satirical manga and anime series Cromartie High School. The mother of one character is seen in at least one episode... And "she" looks exactly like her son but with a skirt and longer hair.
  • Cute High Earth Defense Club LOVE! and its sequel, perhaps to emphasize the gimmick of being a Gender Flipped Magical Girl series, is set at an all-boys' school and never features a female character. (This becomes a bit odd when one of the first series' leads is supposed to be a heterosexual Casanova Wannabe.)
  • Sand Land has very few women onscreen in the entirety of its volume, and the ones that do appear are few-and-far-between nameless extras. The second arc "Angellic Heroes" in the 2024 anime adaptation would later avert this, however, with Princess Ann joining the main cast.
  • Unlike the mixed-gender production studios of the first two series, THE iDOLM@STER: SideM has everyone in 315 Productions be male. The Ambiguous Gender producer of the game's Magazines was even adapted into a man here. The games also features Yuko Sanpei as the only female voice talent, the rest are all male, even the ones playing the young children and the Wholesome Crossdresser.
  • Kaiji. There is one woman on the show, but she only appears in a single scene in one episode and says no more than two lines.

    Art 
  • With its basis in a meeting of the Son of God and his all-male Apostles, no woman makes an appearance in The Last Supper.

    Audio Drama 

    Comic Books 
  • Kid Colt (2009): The cast is entirely male. Kid Colt's mother is briefly seen in flashback (one panel with the family, one panel as a silhouette, a final panel as a corpse), but gets no dialogue. The widows of former Confederate officer Wilks' soldiers are mentioned, but never seen or named.
  • Many Franco-Belgian comics, like Spirou & Fantasio or Johan and Peewit, although some of them eventually got female characters in later entries.
    • Among these, The Smurfs are an unusual case, since they are known for The Smurfette Principle, but most their actual classic stories were just with male characters, and the Smurfette was a one-shot character who didn't become a regular until years later.

    Fan Works 

    Films — Animated 
  • The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad: The Adventures of Mr. Toad, the first story, has exclusively male characters. Mr. Toad and his horse do dress up as women at one point, though.
  • The entire cast of Pooh's Grand Adventure is male, since Kanga, the only named main female character in the franchise, is notably absent.
  • None of the named characters in Yellow Submarine are female. (In the Gold Key Comics adaptation which used a discarded script for the movie, Rita the Meter Maid was a pivotal figure.)
  • In the entire Killer Bean franchise, there hasn't been a female bean appearing nor mentioned.

    Films — Live-Action — Military 
  • Apocalypse Now, which is both based on a book which is also an example of this trope (Heart of Darkness; see below) and set in the military, almost every character is a member of the armed forces. In the original version, the only female characters who appear at all, aside from unnamed Vietnamese and Cambodian civilians, are the Playboy bunnies sent to Vietnam to entertain the troops. Needless to say, they receive little screen time, don't have any discernible dialogue, and don't play much of a role in the actual plot. Downplayed in the 2001 recut Apocalypse Now Redux, which adds a few scenes with female characters. The Playboy bunnies are encountered again and have some actual dialogue, and a few scenes with a group of French colonists includes some female speaking roles, though none have much importance to the plot.
  • Black Hawk Down has only Shughart's wife answering the phone too late.
  • Das Boot, set on a World War II German submarine, if you except the hooker/singer Monique during the party at the beginning, and Ullmann's French girlfriend he says goodbye to before going on the submarine. Like most militaries of the time, the Kriegsmarine didn't allow women to serve as anything but nurses or auxiliaries, never allowing them on ships.
  • The Bunker (2001) focuses on nine German soldiers trapped in a bunker on the German-Belgian border in the closing days of World War II. Not only are all the major characters male, but every bit part, extra and character seen in flashback is also male.
  • Crimson Tide has Hunter's wife as the only woman appearing very briefly at the beginning of the film.
  • The Deserter takes place among either US cavalry troops or Apache war bands and features almost no women. The only woman of any consequence is Kaleb's wife who is onscreen for only a couple of minutes and dies without saying anything comprehensible.
  • The Dirty Dozen has no named female characters, and only one of the female extras does anything more than mill around in the background during crowd scenes at the chateau or dance with the Dozen at the party in the camp. The sole exception gets to scream once and be murdered by Magot.
  • Dr. Strangelove has precisely one female in the movie, a secretary, who is also a Playboy centrefold.
  • Dunkirk has only two, very brief female speaking roles by servicewomen. At least one critic has argued that this constitutes one of several significant historical inaccuracies in the film.
  • The Enemy Below. The only characters in the film are the all-male crews of a U.S. Navy ship and a German U-boat.
  • A Field in England feature six characters, all of them male. Somewhat understandable, given the limited cast and wartime setting. The only actress in the film voices the field.
  • Full Metal Jacket has a couple of Vietnamese prostitutes and a very young Vietcong girl in an otherwise male dominated warzone. Ironically one of the prostitutes has one of the film's most famous lines ("Me love you long time").
  • Gettysburg: There is talk of wives left behind, but the only women that actually appear in the film are either waving to the troops or tending the wounded in the background.
  • The Great Escape is about a mass escape from a German POW camp in World War II, all of the characters being male. There are a few women as background scenery in some of the city scenes post-escape, but that's about it.
  • Hostile Waters, set primarily on a Soviet submarine at the height of the Cold War. One female US Navy officer does appear as a shore based watch officer, but all other speaking characters are male.
  • K-19: The Widowmaker, set on a Russian submarine during the Cold War.
  • Kelly's Heroes: No female characters at all, unless there are a few in the crowd dancing in the streets in the final scene after Clairmont's liberation.
  • Lawrence of Arabia has no female speaking parts (unless you count people singing in the background).
  • Lebanon follows an Israeli battle tank crew during the Lebanon War of 1982, and pretty much everything happens inside the tank. There's no female characters to speak of, only some civilian Lebanese women caught in the war who can be seen through the tank's gunsight.
  • Master and Commander: Neither the French nor Royal Navies allowed female sailors, and privately owned ships generally considered it bad luck to have women aboard ship (not to say that women never sailed, but they were relatively rare). The solitary woman in the movie is a Brazilian lady who's on screen for all of five seconds doing nothing but twirling a Parasol of Prettiness.
  • There are no women in Outpost, with the mercenary team and the undead Nazi soldiers of the bunker all being male.
  • Patton has only one female speaking role, the dignitary of the Knutsford Welcome Club who introduces General Patton.
  • Platoon, appropriately given the military setting. The only women who appear onscreen are unnamed Vietnamese civilians.
  • Saving Private Ryan is set entirely during the Battle of Normandy from the viewpoint of a US Army squad. As such there are no women in the film aside from some background extras and very minor bit parts. The satirical all-female cut of the film is two minutes long.
  • The Wild Geese has precisely three female speaking parts.

    Films — Live-Action — Other 
  • 12 Angry Men: Since women serve in juries nowadays, adaptations often change this. There's also a gender flipped version, Twelve Angry Women.
  • All Is Lost is an unusual example since Robert Redford is the only character in the entire movie. (And he doesn't even get a real name; he's billed as "Our Man.")
  • In Big Game, there's only a single woman on screen in the entire film, and she's never given a name or function.
  • The Boondock Saints: No named female characters appear in the film. Only one even interacts with the main characters (at the beginning).
  • Boys Town, the story of Father Flanagan's home for troubled boys. Justified in that Boys Town was a boys-only facility that didn't go co-ed until 1979. The only speaking part in the film played by a female is a nurse at the infirmary. She has one line.
  • Deliverance has no female characters of any significance, with all of the protagonists and their hillbilly stalkers being male.
  • In The Devil's Playground, Mrs. Sullivan is the sole female presence among the otherwise all-male main cast. Justified, as the film is set in an all-male religious community.
  • Dreamcatcher: A stranger in the street early on and numerous extras in the military camp are the only women in the film.
  • Duck, You Sucker! has one woman who appears in flashback with no lines, and the only other woman is an annoying racist who is out of the picture in the first 15 minutes.
  • Escape The Undertaker has the titular character himself plus the (all male) members of The New Day.
  • A Fistful of Dollars had two women in supporting roles - except neither got much screentime. One was running the gang whom the story puts less focus on, and the other is just a Damsel in Distress whose only purpose is to give Clint Eastwood's character a Pet the Dog moment towards the end.
  • Glengarry Glen Ross is devoid of women except for two words spoken by an unnamed restaurant employee in the background of one scene.
  • The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Maria, a prostitute appearing in a single scene, is the most important female character and the only one given a name. Four women are seen on screen during the three-hour movie (with something like eight minutes of screen time between them), and only one of them besides Maria has any dialogue at all.
  • The British monster movie Gorgo is mocked for this by the MST3K crew. The only woman who appears is in the background of a crowd scene. Granted, the monster that destroys London in the climax is a female.
  • Killdozer! is about an all male construction crew versus a killer bulldozer.
  • All speaking characters in The Last Outlaw are male. Women only appear very briefly as background characters in the town and saloon scenes.
  • Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels: of the film's 44 speaking parts, only two are female - Tanya (the lady at the poker game) and Gloria (the spaced out girl at the dealers' place). And the latter only speaks once.
  • My Dinner with Andre features only two characters, both of whom are men. (A waitress serves them briefly.)
  • No Escape (1994): There are absolutely no female characters in the film. Every single character is male, even all the technicians in the prison control room. The only one that is mentioned is The Father's deceased wife, and just maybe you can briefly see a woman's silhouette in Robbins' Flashback Echo. Justified in that the plot of the movie involves futuristic prisons which in Real Life are nearly all segregated by sex.
  • In The Raid there are only three women with any speaking lines. None are named and none appears for more than one scene. Berandal fixes this a bit by having one of Rama's antagonists be the Hammer Girl.
  • Reservoir Dogs, concerning a group of male jewelry store robbers. The original script did have a female speaking role and the actress cast in the role filmed her scenes, but the director cut the scenes as they revealed too much about the twist too soon. The only female character is a Plot Device - she shoots Mr. Orange in carjacking attempt.
  • The only female character of significance in The Shawshank Redemption is Andy's wife, who is never named, has no dialogue and is killed in the first five minutes. Most of the film is set in a men's prison, justifying the trope.
  • Silent Running has four male characters, three of whom are killed off, leaving the remaining one with three robots.
  • The only speaking female role in Six Reasons Why is a radio announcer. The only women to appear onscreen are Nomad's mother and two geisha in the town of New Gibraltar, none of whom speak or are onscreen for more than a minute or so.
  • Snatch. has four female speaking parts - Doug the Head's twin daughters, Mickey's mum and the clerk at the bookies.
  • Being set in a men's prison, the cast of Starred Up is almost entirely male. The only female character is the very minor role of Nurse Bankford: a Creator Cameo by casting director Aisha Bywaters.
  • The Thing (1982) takes place in a research station in Antarctica, with only men working there. Because of the setting, no women appear in the movie at all. It was originally cast with one of the researchers female, but the actress had to pull out due to illness and the role was recast with a male actor. This made it more faithful to the source material (see below) and heightened the tension, with a bunch of people running around in beards and puffy jackets with all the same body shape it is much harder to keep track of who is infected.
  • The Treasure of the Sierra Madre: outside of the occasional extra during the earlier scenes, the cast of the movie consists of three men, four if you include Cody (who isn't in the movie for very long but has a major impact on the plot). There's also the bandits, but they're not given as much focus.
  • Withnail and I, centering on the two titular characters and Withnail's uncle Monty. All of the secondary characters are also male. The only female characters who appear onscreen are a local farmer's wife who has three or four lines of dialogue, and a handful of extras.

    Literature 
  • Played with in After Doomsday, which has a Two Lines, No Waiting plot involving an all-male spaceship crew and an all-female crew on another spaceship, who are the only survivors after Earth is destroyed. Naturally the survival of the species depends on them finding each other.
  • Isaac Asimov:
    • Black Widowers concerns the dinners of a men-only club. Aside from the six members, their male waiter is the only other recurring character, and guests are required to be male — though this rule was violated once, since Asimov wanted to see Rubin throw a fit.
    • The Complete Adventures of Lucky Starr: An exclusively male cast. There is an aversion in Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus; a housewife with speaking lines who is on-screen for less than a chapter. Otherwise, the protagonists, antagonists, and suspects are always male characters.
  • Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Most of the characters work for an ivory trading company at a time when women in the workforce were decidedly scarce. There is a female character with a short but thematically important speaking part — she just isn't named.
  • The Hobbit: There isn't a single named female speaking role (some of the elves, humans or spiders are given female pronouns but remain nameless). The film adaptations avert this, bringing in Galadriel with the White Council subplot, as well as Tauriel, an elf invented for the films.
  • The entire regular cast of Horus Heresy is male, which matches the setting in that all the Primarchs are male and only men can become Space Marines.
  • How NOT to Write a Novel refers to the tendency of male authors writing novels with exclusively male casts as the "Stag Night", noting that it's particularly common in science fiction.
  • The Iron Dream: There is not a single line of dialogue spoken by a woman. The words 'she' and 'her' simply do not appear at any point in the book. Note that this was done deliberately by the author, who was writing a parody.
  • The Longest Joke in the World has only male named characters.
  • Lord of the Flies. All of the characters are pupils from an all-male boarding school who get stranded on a desert island.
  • Despite a massive array of texts, only one of the stories written by H. P. Lovecraft, "The Thing on the Doorstep", had a significant female character, and even then there was a whole complicated thing where it turned out to actually be her father who had stolen her body, and at the very end, the narrator's best friend trapped inside her decomposing corpse.
  • The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G. K. Chesterton. No special reason; it just focuses on a fairly small group of main characters who happen to be all male.
  • Every single named character in Prokleta Avlija is male. Somewhat justified, as for the most time, it takes place in an Ottoman prison.
  • Small Gods has an all-male cast. The only mention of women are in Brutha's recollections of his horrifying grandmother and the presence of a couple of goddesses in non-speaking roles. (The Church admittedly doesn't approve of women, and the setting's other major location specifically excludes women when referring to "the people", alongside children, foreigners, and "people who really aren't our kind of people").
  • There are no female characters aside from a scant few mentions of Hyde's victims in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
  • There are no women whatsoever in Wasp (1957). Nobody female is even mentioned, even as a background character.
  • The short story "Who Goes There?", upon which the aforementioned film The Thing (1982) was based.

    Live-Action TV 

    Music Videos 

    Podcasts 

    Theater 
  • American Buffalo has an all-male cast.
  • The Boys in the Band, whose plot revolves around a group of gay men in New York.
  • Cesare - Il Creatore che ha distrutto takes place in a university in 1491, and adapts the early part of the source material, before any of the major female characters, like the protagonist's sister, appear. The female ensemble members who appear are shown equally with the males, working more closely together in the workshop scene than they would have in real life. One scene also features a mix of male and female backup dancers in costumes that make them all appear androgynously beautiful. It appeals to the same 2.5D audience as Touken Ranbu, Tsukipro, and The Prince of Tennis, and the cast includes actors who have appeared in all three of those series, as well as A3 and Ensemble Stars.
  • The cast of The Club consists of six men (typical for professional sports in Australia in the late 70s). The Movie adds a few female characters, but none in a major role.
  • Glengarry Glen Ross has an all-male cast and is set in a high power real estate office.
  • All the versions of Sleuth (the original play, the 1972 movie version, and the 2007 remake) have a Minimalist Cast, where the male stars are pretty much the only characters we ever see. The 1972 movie has one short scene with a female character, but she isn't named, while the wife of one of the main characters can briefly be seen from behind in the closing scene of the 2007 version (but receives no lines).
  • Jason Miller's That Championship Season features a cast of five, including four former members of a high school men's basketball team and their coach.
  • The audience for 2.5D stage plays like the Musical Touken Ranbu series are generally 90%+ female, and there to see the Cast Full of Pretty Boys, so the Canon Foreigner characters tend to be pretty boys as well. There has only been one female character in the series, played by a Takarazuka Revue graduate.
  • The same rule applies to the Tsukiuta series. There are exceptions — the Bird Queen in Rabbits Kingdom, Queen Musa in Tsukino Empire 2, and SeleaS members Tsubaki and Reina in Shiawase Awase. Fluna and SeleaS have their own series, as well — see below. Two plays in the Tsukino Hyakki Yakou universe have had female original characters despite having only male idols.
  • Waiting for Godot: Vladimir, Estragon, Pozzo, Lucky and a small boy (some productions play with this, given that "Pozzo" and "Lucky" are decidedly androgynous names).
  • YoRHa Boys ver. 1.0 featured an all-male cast, contrary to most of the YoRHa plays.
  • The Moby-Dick opera has an all-male cast like the book it's based on, as it takes place on a whaling vessel. That being said, the role of Pip the cabin boy is traditionally played by a woman.

    Toys 
  • Usually, LEGO averts this trope, even if it's by means of The Smurfette Principle, but there are a few exceptions:
    • Early Technic spinoffs, including Competition, Slizer/Throwbots, and RoboRiders, only featured male characters. BIONICLE was the first to break the mold.
    • LEGO Dino 2010 had a cast consisting entirely of four men. Its American counterpart, LEGO Dino Attack, just barely averts this with the appearance of Dr. Nicole Soscia in one of the online stories.
    • The Aquanauts, Aquasharks, Aquaraiders, and Stingray factions of Aquazone feature no female characters. The later Spiritual Successor Aqua Raiders did not have any female characters either.
    • Unlike its predecessor Rock Raiders, LEGO Power Miners did not have any female characters.
    • The second LEGO Space Police line, Spyrius, RoboForce, and UFO feature no female characters.
      • In the sets, LEGO Mars Mission has an entirely male cast. However, the LEGO Battles videogame averts this by introducing two female characters that did not appear in the original toyline: Gemma and the Alien Queen.
    • LEGO Time Cruisers and Time Twisters feature only male characters, even in the LEGO Mania crossover comics with other themes, though this was averted in the World Club Magazine comics.
    • Although neither Knights' Kingdom nor LEGO Vikings featured female characters in the main toylines, this was averted in the chess sets for each line due to the need for a queen.
    • Mixels, for the longest time, lacked any female-presenting Mixels, as they have No Biological Sex, but the ones introduced had been male-presenting so far. Finally, the episode "Every Knight Has Its Day" revealed the female-presenting Flexer teacher, though female-presenting ones had been hinted at for a long while.

    Video Games 
  • Team Fortress Classic had nine (ten, if you count the Civilian) class models, all male. Comics released for Team Fortress 2 claim that the Pyro was retroactively female, but in Classic itself the Pyro uses a male voice, and in his original model had a visible face that was clearly male (and looked nothing like the one in the comic).
  • Half-Life: aside from a pre-recorded hologram that appears in the optional tutorial, as well as a handful of Faceless Mooks appearing in two rooms with no dialogue, every human character is male. Half-Life: Blue Shift doesn't even go that far and just has nothing remotely resembling a female period. Averted with Decay, which has two female protagonists, though they're still the only females in the game with dialogue. The Fan Remake Black Mesa also averts this by putting in a few female scientists. In any case, this is mostly justified by the setting, where most every character is a theoretical physicist, a security guard, or a soldier, all of these being overwhelmingly male professions.
  • There are zero women in all of Fire Warrior, which is somewhat justified by the setting being first a pair of warships and then a base being invaded by Chaos.
  • There are no females in most of the Counter-Strike games; not announcers or player models in the original and Source, not NPCs or enemy mooks in Condition Zero.
  • The first couple Age of Empires games featured zero females other than one of the potential voiceless villager models. Justified as everyone else is a soldier of some kind.
  • In Castle Crashers, all playable characters and villains are male, this includes the Pink Knight. While there are princesses, their only purpose is to be saved, there's no other interaction with them, and one of them turns out to be Tricky the Clown.
  • Donkey Kong Country Returns manages to be this as only five characters (Donkey, Diddy, Cranky, Rambi and Squawks) come from previous games and everyone else appears to be male or having unconfirmed genders.
  • Throughout the Kingdom Hearts games, certain worlds will have a gender-uneven population. So far, two worlds (Space Paranoids and Symphony of Sorcery) have only male characters, while the sole female in Toy Box is a boss.
  • The first two Modern Warfare games never featured female characters, beyond occasional nameless civilians in the background and the chopper pilot Outlaw who lasted one mission.
  • Outlast has absolutely no female characters in the game, but a couple are mentioned in the collectible documents scattered throughout the game. The Whistleblower DLC lampshades this with Edward Gluskin. He wants a bride, but there's only men to be found. He's not fussed, as he knows ways around that biological impossibility...
  • In Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters, the only female-looking character, Luna, is actually a genderless puppet and warship. The rest of the cast are male.
  • Space Rangers, unless you count Makhpella, a Hive Queen of a race of non-organic crystal-based lifeforms. Other than that, every single pilot and government official (all of whom share a single model per race) are male. What's weird is that, according to lore, Pelengs can change their sex at will, while Faeyans are naturally hermaphroditic, but all of them are almost always treated as male. The second game allows the player to choose a female portrait, but it doesn't change the dialogue at all. The HD Revolution version finally introduces female NPCs in the form of a separate NPC type, special agents. They, however, are all human, and women of other races remain unseen.
  • Most classic Sonic the Hedgehog games were exclusively male, save for Sonic Spinball (featuring Sally and Bunnie from Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM)), Tails' Skypatrol (which had a female villain), and the few featuring Amy. Two other female characters, Honey the Cat and Tiara Boobowski, were planned for Sonic the Fighters and Sonic X-treme respectively, but were both cancelled along with the latter game itself, as had been a formerly planned human girlfriend for Sonic back in game 1.
  • All of the named characters in Spec Ops: The Line are male, much like the works the game took inspiration from (Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now; see above for more information). Most of them are members of the armed forces. Female civilians do pop up here and there, but they never really feature in the plot or receive names.
  • The original Spyro the Dragon features about 80 named, voiced characters, all male. There are female-looking enemies in a couple of stages, but they're not named. The reimagining rectified this by giving the Save Fairies proper voice actresses.
  • In S.T.A.L.K.E.R., you will never meet a female Stalker. Ever. That's not to say there are no female Stalkers, they get mentioned in dropped PDAs and conversations as Action Girlfriends, but developer laziness means no female models. Of course mods exist for adding female Stalkers into the game.
  • All the fighters in the original Street Fighter are male.
  • Styx: Master of Shadows has all different kinds of fantasy races, from goblins to humans to orcs to elves, and they are all male.
  • Aside from the Featureless Protagonist Player Character who doesn't have a gender, the entire cast of Touken Ranbu, even down to the voice actors.
  • Every boxer in Punch-Out!! is male. Female characters are extremely rare, and there is only one named female characternote . This is at least somewhat justified, seeing as the series focuses on boxing, a male-dominated sport. The spinoff Arm Wrestling features a girl named Alice who is indirectly participating by controlling a robotic monkey called Ape III (the tournament is unisex; what prevents Alice from playing directly is her young age).
  • Much like its spiritual predecessor, the original Fatal Fury features no female combatants.
  • The original Mega Man X features no female characters whatsoever.
  • The Neverhood's main cast is all-male. There are female characters mentioned in The Hall of Records, but The Hall of Records is worldbuilding that is mostly irrelevant to the game's plot.
  • The original versions of Swords and Sandals have all-male casts. Averted in Redux, which gives you the option to play as a female, and even if you don't, some of the opponents are female as well.
  • The entire cast of Gadget: Past as Future are men, even the Featureless Protagonist who is revealed to be named Louis Hausmann in the tie-in material. Averted in the spin-off novel The Third Force where the protagonist is Louis's sister, Elena Hausmann, and there are a few incidental female characters mentioned throughout; it also retroactively makes the extreme gender-imbalance of the games make more sense, as it is mentioned that the Empire's society is sexist towards women, not expecting them to become scientists or government employees, which the majority of Gadget's characters are.

    Web Animation 
  • Prevalent in the early videos of SMG4: Bowser from the games is a rage-fuelled One-Man Army that even the Mario Bros. have trouble with. The Bowser in this series is easily pummeled and restrained and much more prone to collapsing into a sobbing heap when things go wrong.'', as the only female characters of importance were Peach and Toadette. Even episodes that featured them, especially the former, usually resulted in them being taken out early and the male cast taking the focus. That said, even with the new female characters, episodes focusing on the guys will still crop up from time-to-time.

    Webcomics 
  • Every character of importance in Weak Hero is male, and most of the supporting cast are too. One hundred chapters in and the amount of female characters can be counted on one hand- and of those, only one has had any relevance to the plot.
  • Parodied by xkcd here. Treebeard explains to the Fellowship that there are no more Entwives, then assumes because the Fellowship is a sausage party that the same is true of them. The comic is also potholed to a supercut of every scene in the film trilogy where two females interact. All two seconds of it.

    Web Original 
  • Three Seven Tenverse had a few named female characters of low importance, but every main character is male.
  • The Time... Guys involves no female characters. This is partially due to them making a joke of their small cast by having one actor play every historical figure they meet.

    Western Animation 
  • Aqua Teen Hunger Force is an edge case. All of the main characters are male, as are 99% of the side characters they interact with. Two of the incredibly few female characters are named (one is a porn actress playing herself and the other has a ridiculous stripper name, though others are sometimes named in the credits) and most don't live to see the end of their episode. It’s somewhat justified since the Aqua Teens are unemployed shut-ins and humans in general (aside from Carl) only rarely appear.
  • Until Blackarachnia's introduction in the eighth episode of the series, all the Beast Wars characters were male.
  • Dastardly & Muttley in Their Flying Machines. With the exception of Muttley's girlfriend in his fantasy segments and the German farm maiden in "Barnstormers," not an XX chromosome in sight.
  • The Rick and Morty episode "The Ricklantis Mixup" only includes Rick and Morty, and their various counterparts from alternate dimensions in the Citadel of Ricks.
  • Most of the episodes from Timon & Pumbaa feature only male characters, with Shenzi as the only female character to appear in more than one episode.
  • The Trap Door has only male characters, which isn't surprising considering all voices in the show were performed by William Rushton. Well... that, and the fact that there are very, very few characters that talk (the rest being some kind of Eldritch Abomination).

Female Only:

    Anime & Manga 
  • The recurring cast of Asteroid in Love, like most works published under the Manga Time Kirara brand, is all-female despite the fact that this series is about astronomy and geology. It somehow avoided falling into Improbably Female Cast, however, by making all professional scientists male, as the area is still mostly male.
  • Candy☆Boy and Yuyushiki don't seem to have any male characters at all.
  • In The Girl I Want is So Handsome!, which focuses on a girls' basketball team at a high school (which is implied to be coed, as the Bifauxnen Shiki wears a male uniform's cardigan) has only female characters. Shiki's older brother is mentioned in passing but never actually appears.
  • In Girls und Panzer, there are only a handful of male characters. Shinzaburou (the Isuzu household servant) has very few lines, as does Yukari's father. The MEXT official who announces Oarai's planed closure has a significant impact but only appears in one scene in the original anime.
  • Gushing Over Magical Girls takes this to the extreme, as not only are all the major characters but all the teachers and students in Utena's school are female (excusable as potentially a One-Gender School), the only parents seen are moms, and every incidental background character is also female, with not a single male ever seen. Even Venalita, despite being referred to as male in English due to translator guessing based on early pronoun omission, was eventually revealed to also be female.
  • Haitai Nanafa: No male character, except for a couple in the background, and a passing ghost.
  • Hitoribocchi no OO Seikatsu takes place at a coed middle school, but the only boys are background characters. Late in the manga, Bocchi befriends all the boys in her class as a result of befriending another of the girls.
  • ICE: The Last Generation takes place in a setting where all men died and remaining women fight over ideological differences (if they should or shouldn't bring men back) and an ICE (which is an only thing that can help them reproduce).
  • Every named character in The Great Jahy Will Not Be Defeated! is female. The only male characters are a couple of cops that gave Jahy some trouble at the beginning, and a man that crossdresses as a magical girl that Jahy mistakes for the actual Magical Girl.
  • Little Witch Academia (2013)'s original short film had no human male characters, unless you count extras in the prologue. Justified since after that scene the whole thing is set at an all-girl's Wizarding School. Averted in the sequel, but even there only one male character is important enough to get a name. This is averted in the TV series, as there are multiple male characters seen, named, and mentioned.
  • The Love Live! franchise's recurring casts are entirely female; male characters typically only show up as background characters or with their faces obscured (and Nico's little brother Cotaro is the only male character with any lines at all). To further drive it home, every school featured in the series is an all-girls school.
  • Like many series serialized in Manga Time Kirara, Gourmet Girl Graffiti's cast of 8 are all female of different ages.
  • Strike Witches: the only named characters shown are all female.
  • In The Summer You Were There, the only male character is Kaori's father, who makes a few short appearances late in the series and is never named.
  • In Urara Meirocho, while the fact that the uraras are all women have internal justification, the fact that all the law enforcement in the town are women smacks of this trope.
  • In Yuri is My Job!, all the named characters are female. A handful of extras, like customers at the salon, teachers and students at the characters' school, and Mitsuki's father, are male.
  • There's not a single named boy in Yuki Yuna is a Hero. The only males that get a second of screentime are the Taisha (a group of masked priests who are only actually seen in one episode), the girls' fairies (only one of whom can actually speak, and there with One Sentence Vocabulary) and a character's kid brother in the prequel.
  • YuruYuri mainly takes place at an all-girls middle school and does not have a single male character in the anime adaptation, with the exception of several extras that have no spoken lines. Sometimes this goes to improbable levels, like when all the participants at Comuket are female despite its Real Life counterpart, Comiket, having a mostly male audience. Ironically, had this been a 70s period piece, this would actually have been pretty accurate, as the attendance of the first Comiket in 1975 was 90% female, although there were still some men. Even now statistically most doujinshi authors are women, and usually one day of Comiket weekend is catered more to female otaku.

    Comic Books 
  • Small Favors takes this to its logical conclusion by not having any male characters at all, even in the background, and never getting around to establishing whether they even exist in the setting. Though they must have got the idea of strap-ons from somewhere...
  • Wonder Woman and the Star Riders: Every single character is female, heroes, villain or otherwise to the point that it's unclear whether or not there are any males in the setting.
  • The Blonde, a Classy Cat-Burglar who stars in of series of erotic comics by Italian artist Franco Saudelli, seems to live in a world populated almost solely by women. At most, you might spot the occasional male background character, but any character with a speaking role is going to be female.

    Comic Strips 
  • All of the main characters in Madam & Eve are female, with three adult women and an eight-year-old girl. Males are relegated to either supporting characters or Real Life political and celebrity figures. Technically, Gwen "Madam" Anderson has an adult son, but he hasn't appeared in the comic for over a decade.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • 8 Women: As the title implies, it's all about eight women. There is one male actor in the film (who plays Marcel), but they make it a point not to show his face or give him lines and he only appears onscreen very sparsely and briefly.
  • Cry 'Havoc': There are a few scattered men in bit parts as wounded soldiers; a young Robert Mitchum has one line. But 99% of the action and dialogue are focused on 13 female nurses at an Army combat hospital on Bataan during the battle against the Japanese in 1942.
  • The only male character in The Descent is the protagonist's husband, who gets maybe one line of dialogue before being abruptly killed in the first five minutes of the film. The Crawlers are sexually dimorphic, but they don't appear to be human, don't receive names, have no dialogue other than grunts and howls, and according to some interpretations of the film don't really exist outside of the clearly disturbed protagonist's head.
  • The Field Guide to Evil: There are no male characters in the segment "The Sinful Women of Höllfall" (even the monster the Trud manifests in a female form). The setting seems to be an isolated all-female religious community, but the details are not made explicit.
  • The French movie Innocence, directed by Lucile Hadzihalilovic, is set in a mysterious boarding school for girls, where the staff is all-female too. A few males appear briefly, but they have no speaking roles.
  • All speaking roles in Suspiria (2018) are played by women, including the one male character, Dr. Klemperer, who is played by Tilda Swinton under heavy makeup.
  • The 1939 version of The Women went so far as to have all the animals seen on screen be female, as well as the entire cast. All the paintings are of women, too. The film's source play is also an example of the trope. The 2008 remake did the same, every character in the film is female including the extras, the main character's husband is mentioned but never seen or heard from, and at the end of the film one of the characters gives birth to a boy.

    Literature 
  • Godmother Night by Rachel Pollack. The main characters are two women and their daughter, and the eponymous godmother is also female, of course.
  • The Stars Are Legion, by Kameron Hurley. This novel is a forceful rebuttal to a male-dominated genre (Science fiction in this particular case), just as most of its author's works. The Legion, where the novel is set, is a collection of organic world-sized ships, each populated with an all-female clan that endlessly battles with the other ships' clans. This organic nature is key to both worldbuilding and plot, displaying an interesting approach to motherhood. The Legion literally rebuilds itself with parts birthed by its female occupants, who sometimes gestate replacement parts, and at other times, become pregnant with entire worlds. Life in the Legion is birth and rebirth, over and over.
  • The world of Whileaway in Joanne Russ' novel The Female Man, is all female, with the men having been wiped out ages ago by a plaguenote , and is unabashedly utopian.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Class of '07: The setting is the reunion of the titular graduating class from an all-girls' school after a decade. Given this, all the main characters on the show and supporting characters too are women (girls in the flashbacks). Male characters only appear in the flashbacks or briefly at the end during the first season.
  • The Knots Landing episode "The Three Sisters", in which the women of Seaview Circle visit an allegedly haunted house, is the only episode not to feature any of the male regular characters. The only male character is an unnamed local who appears in one scene.
  • The second season episode "Jessica Behind Bars" from Murder, She Wrote takes place during a lockdown at a women's prison. In addition to Jessica, the only characters are the prisoners, the staff, the warden, and the lieutenant governor - all portrayed by women.
  • In the third season of the CW's Supergirl (2015), there is an episode where Fort Rozz, a Kryptonian space prison is revolving around a blue sun. This sun destroys all "y" chromosomes so in order to go there and get information from a criminal still on it, Supergirl has to round up previous villains and side-kicks that are all female. There are side plots with male characters back home of course, but the main focus is the all female cast.
  • Two episodes of The Twilight Zone (1959) feature all-female casts with the exception of a brief voice-over from a male actor: "The Invaders" (in which Agnes Moorehead is the only actor seen on screen) and "Night Call".
  • The seventh season episode "Swear" of The Walking Dead (2010) is a Tara-centric Bottle Episode where she encounters an all-female group of survivors. The only male characters who appear in the episode are Heath, who has about five minutes of screen time before disappearing, and Eugene, who appears briefly near the end and has no dialogue.

    Music Videos 

    Theater 
  • Euripides' play The Trojan Women is about some of the royal women during and after the sacking of Troy.
  • David Mamet's play Boston Marriage, revolving around a lesbian romantic relationship. Mamet's impetus to write the play was criticism he had received that he was only able to write convincing male characters.
  • Federico García Lorca's La casa de Bernarda Alba, which is about a strict mother who keeps her five daughters at home.
  • The one-act play Chamber Music by Arthur Kopit takes place in an insane asylum with eight women who think they are famous people from history. There is an unnamed male doctor.
  • Eclipsed is notable not only for it's all-female cast of sex slaves and rebels in war-torn Liberia but also that it was written and directed by women, the first award-winning play to do so.
  • The play Last Summer At Bluefish Cove, by Jane Chambers, set in a lesbian beach resort area.
  • The play Steel Magnolias by Robert Harling has six characters, all female. Several male characters are mentioned, but none appear onstage. The trope is averted in the film adaptation.
  • The play Top Girls by Caryl Churchill, which has a cast of 7-9 women; it's about women keeping each other down in the business world of 80s England.
  • Tsukiuta Girls' Side: Megasta features the members of Fluna and Seleas, Idol Singer units (who are actually moon goddesses). The stage original characters tend to all be female, though the second play featured cameo appearances from the male units' members.
  • The play Uncommon Women And Others by Wendy Wasserstein. About friendships in a women's college.
  • The Vagina Monologues. While over the years the episodes have been expanded to include trans experiences, for the longest time they were centered exclusively on cisgender women and even nowadays it's likelier the year's script's "non-cis episodes" to be about trans women than trans men.
  • YoRHa: The conbat-oriented models of the titular androids are female. Male YoRHa wouldn't be seen in the plays until the third installment, which is covered in the "Male Only" section. From that point on, the subsequent plays averted this by introducing a mix of both male and female characters.

    Toys 
  • The first two waves of Lalaloopsy dolls were all female. The overall toyline averted this in Wave 3, with the introduction of Patch Treasurechest, the first male Lala, but afterwards, many subsequent waves are all female.
  • My Little Pony: Every single pony in G3 is entirely female, with the only male character being Spike the dragon. All other generations feature male and female ponies.
  • Novi Stars: All of the dolls are female. The only male character in sight is Derek, who is exclusive to the webshow, and we don't even see his face! The possibility of male characters joining the roster was discussed in a comment section on the official Novi Stars Facebook page once upon a time, but this turned out fruitless because of the doll line's sudden cancellation.

    Video Games 
  • The Arcana Heart fighting game series is proudly composed of an all-female roster.
  • Cute Bite: There's teachers for 12 classes, about 9 Hunting targets, and about 15 attendees to be interacted at, in Balls. All are female. The only male is the Old Master, who presumably died before the gameplay starts.
  • The cast of Heart of the Woods is entirely female, save for one old man who Madison and Tara briefly speak with while interviewing residents of Eysenfeld. He's so minor that he doesn't have a name or a sprite, and could have been removed without any noticeable impact on the story.
  • In Luxaren Allure, all four heroes, and the villain, are female.
  • PlayStation 2 RPG Nuga Cel informs you outright at the start that absolutely no men will be appearing in the game, not even as NPCs. The (male) narrator who informs you of this is fired on the spot, never to be seen again. Although the player character is male, he is never seen or heard, unless you get a particular ending where he becomes the final boss.
  • Portal really only has Chell and GLaDOS; the Rat Man's existence is implied (and nothing implies it must be a man in-game) and one of GLaDOS's cores seen for about a minute has a male voice, but other voiced supporting "characters" like the turrets and Curiosity Core are "female" as well.
  • Rabi-Ribi has exactly one male character with a name, and his role is so minor that he doesn't even get a character portrait. Additionally, only one small area contains male NPCs, and only one character mentions her father at any point in the game's story.
  • Microprose's Rex Nebular And The Cosmic Gender Bender features a planet filled with militaristic women. It's only later in the game that you learn that there was a war involving the two sexes, the end result being the women wiped out all the men via biological warfare. Not only did women have to reproduce by using the aforementioned Gender Bender to temporarily change their genitalia, the virus used had an unintended side-effect of making the women incapable of having male babies ever again.
  • Skullgirls started out with an all-female roster, though eventually Big Band and Beowulf were added to the roster, with the possibility of more male characters making it in in the future.
  • The vast majority of Touhou Project media contains entirely female casts - when men are involved, they are either nameless One Shot Characters or never appear on-screen. For context, the most prominent exceptions are Rinnosuke from Curiosities of Lotus Asia (a Non-Action Guy who rarely leaves his shop) and Unzan from Touhou Seirensen ~ Undefined Fantastic Object (the non-speaking Guardian Entity of another character). In the PC-98 games the role of The One Guy was instead filled by Genji, a talking turtle.

    Webcomics 
  • Occasionally, a man (like on the girls' fathers) might be mentioned, but every single character we actually see or hear in Ladies In Waiting is a little girl.
  • Woman World is set in a world where men have gone extinct, and therefore has an all-female cast.

    Web Original 
  • Most of Dina M Nealey's work, particularly her erotic drawings and comics, tends to be dominated by female characters. The occasional male character might appear, but they're usually the result of commissions or crossovers with other online creators.

    Western Animation 
  • The whole pony race in My Little Pony (G3) is completely female, with not a single Y chromosome in sight, thus the cast is made up of majorly female actors, save for the one male character Spike.

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