In the beginning, Starbuck was a man. The cocky, cigar-chomping lead of the 1970s science-fiction TV show Battlestar Galactica was known for his fighter-pilot skills and having a thing for the ladies.

But when the Sci Fi Channel brought the show back in 2004, Sci Fi exec Dave Howe and series creator Ronald Moore made a radical call: They turned Starbuck into a woman.

Howe says this decision and others like it—changing another main character to a woman and making the U.S. president in the show female—were made to increase the show’s appeal to women, as well as to signal that the new series wasn’t simply going to be a remake of the old one.

“We’re selling adults 18 to 54”—not just men, says Howe. By neglecting female viewers, Sci Fi was “potentially cutting off half our revenue stream.”  

Even those initial decisions, however, weren’t enough to overcome the show’s traditional appeal to men, and barely a third of the show’s viewers were women by the start of the second season. So Howe and the show’s producers and writers made even more changes, renewing the focus on Starbuck and her romantic relationships, adding in several other strong female characters, and scaling back on the show’s violence. Gradually more women started to tune in, and the show’s fourth season premiere in April delivered a record 1.1 million female viewers. For the season, almost 40 percent of the show’s viewers have been women.

As more and more shows compete for a dwindling television audience, aggressive efforts like Howe’s to woo female viewers have become common, especially since many female viewers of original programming tend to be more affluent. (Battlestar Galactica’s female fans, for example, have a median income of $68,000, $20,000 higher than the network’s overall median income.) Indeed, the number of shows on cable featuring strong female central characters is unprecedented. Among the shows that have become hits for their networks in recent years are TNT’s The Closer, about a female police chief played by Kyra Sedgwick; Saving Grace starring Holly Hunter as a police detective; USA’s In Plain Sight about a female U.S. marshal with the Witness Protection Program played by Mary McCormack; F/X’s Damages starring Glenn Close as a calculating lawyer; and Lifetime’s Army Wives about a group of women living on an Army post.

“There are shows now, for the first time in many, many years, that have women front and center,” says Bonnie Hammer, the president of NBC Universal Cable Entertainment who heads up both the USA Network and the Sci Fi Channel. Hammer was involved in making Battlestar Galactica more female-friendly, and as the head of the USA Network, she developed In Plain Sight.

Kris Magel, the director of national broadcast at Initiative Media, a media and marketing company in New York, says that while certain shows and networks have always sought to appeal to women, the use of original programming with strong female leads and women-friendly story lines is a new strategy that’s paid dividends for the cable networks producing them.

“These shows are doing really good ratings against a more upscale female audience,” Magel says, pointing out that original programming tends to attract pickier TV viewers that are harder to reach and thus more valuable to advertisers.

High-quality original programs on cable can charge as much as two-thirds of what prime-time broadcast shows do for advertising, according to industry sources.

Among women 18 to 54, In Plain Sight attracts significantly higher-income viewers, according to USA. The show attracts female viewers with household incomes $5,000 higher than the network’s median for women that age, $53,000. For the same group, the median income of the audience for USA’s The Starter Wife, a miniseries about a woman whose husband leaves her for a younger woman that’s slated to become a regular series in the fall, was even higher at $68,000.

“Army Wives is another example” of a show, with strong female characters, that women respond to, says Andrea Wong, president of Lifetime, the grande dame in a group of cable channels, including Oxygen and WE tv, designed to appeal specifically to women. Among Lifetime viewers who make over $75,000, the ratings for Army Wives are seven times higher than Lifetime’s average viewing audience.

Wong cites recent Army Wives story lines, including one about a woman who was worried about her professional future after finding out that she was pregnant and another about a character who was in an accident but didn’t have health care, as evidence that much cable programming “is evolving” in terms of serving women.

Even as female audiences are becoming more coveted, women are dominating the executive ranks of many cable networks. In addition to Hammer and Wong, other prominent female cable execs include Bravo’s president, Lauren Zalaznick, AMC’s head of scripted original programming Christina Wayne, and HBO Entertainment president Sue Naegle (see our head-to-head comparison of the programming chiefs at the major cable networks).

“We know our audience well because 52 percent of the viewing audience is women,” says Lifetime’s Wong.

As for Dave Howe at the Sci Fi Channel, he says he plans to continue making changes to increase the network’s female appeal. “We are looking at everything from marketing to programming, ensuring we appeal to women as much as we appeal to men,” he says.

And if that means balancing out spaceships and aliens with more character development and relationships—everything that Howe calls the “more touchy-feely stuff”—so be it.