“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.