Let me preface my question by saying I am not trying to challenge anything, just genuinely curious: In response to the Women in Refrigerator trope, how is it sexist for females to die when just as many male characters die? I mean, the majority of comic cha

****************

I'm sorry, I mean no offense, but holy god, I've answered this question a billion times. :)

Okay. It's math, very simple, to start with. There were, at the time, INFINITELY more viable and prominent male characters than female ones. So killing a male character diminished that pool by a fraction of a percent. Killing a female character might diminish the pool of viable female characters that were CURRENTLY getting exposure by several percentage points.  Killing or depowering a few dozen cut their pool down IMMENSELY.

There were other factors, three, basically.

1) The deaths of male and female characters were usually different. There was often a sexual component missing wholly from the male deaths. But also, male deaths were usually heroic, whereas the female deaths and depowerings tended to be sheer victimhood. Compare a heroic, FLASH-like death to, say, Barbara's being shot in the Killing Joke. It's a huge difference.

2) The deaths and depowerings of male characters were almost always undone within a year or two. It was more like a decade for the female characters.

3) Usually, the female deaths were purely plot points, they weren't even stories ABOUT the female characters. I'm thinking of Katma Tui, a long-standing and popular Green Lantern. The GL of the story comes home and finds her chopped up and dead in the kitchen (if I remember correctly). In essence, the deaths became a purely shock tactic cliche for the male character to get violent on the villain's skull. Their deaths were only plot points for vengeance stories, so they were tossed aside quite casually.

It's important to remember this was a dumbass trend during a kind of dumbass period in comics. It still happens, but at the time, publishers didn't think there WERE female readers in any numbers. So if you took out a few dozen viable, prominent female characters, you essentially left almost NO unmutilated female characters for female readers to read about.

"It happens to guys, too!" is just not looking at the whole question.

Hope that helps!