Basically, it is becoming more common in English writing to use the masculine “hero” as gender neutral when the figure is a famous and/or historical figure.
If it is a fictional character, “heroine” is still widely used.
There’s been a wider trend of using gender neutral terms in the language. “They” as a replacement for “he” or “she”, for example, used to be improper but is now quite widely accepted and not only when speaking about a non-binary person.
Good conversation on the topic here
Basically, it is becoming more common in English writing to use the masculine “hero” as gender neutral when the figure is a famous and/or historical figure.
If it is a fictional character, “heroine” is still widely used.
There’s been a wider trend of using gender neutral terms in the language. “They” as a replacement for “he” or “she”, for example, used to be improper but is now quite widely accepted and not only when speaking about a non-binary person.
“they” has always been proper, it just used to be incorrectly taught agaist like split infinitives and ending a sentence with a proposition.
Wikipedia dates its first usge as over 500 years ago, and complaints less than 300.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
Take that one up with my English professors in University.