Were you worried about too many strong women on Voyager?

I had a midnight idea that we should put a Borg on the show as a character. And Rick Berman said, 'Make it a babe.'

What if it was a striking, amazing looking Borg woman. And thinking back to the popularity of the Borg Queen, we thought, this could be a really cool character.

It certainly never occurred to me that, 'uh-oh, another woman, what's the audience going to think?'. We just did it.

We knew that we wanted this very special dynamic with Janeway, we knew that Janeway kind of needed her Data or her Spock, and we knew that Seven of Nine could be that. It wasn't until later that we realised, that, how female oriented the show was becoming.

If you think about it - the doctor was very effeminate, I mean, he had no genitals, he was a hologram. Tuvok has no emotions, Kim's a young boy. There wasn't a lot of testosterone flying through that show at all. And who is the arch villain of the piece? The Borg Queen. And we had this other character named Seska, it was like all women, all the time. But that's Star Trek and I don't think you have to worry that much about gender issues on Star Trek.