There are some incredibly powerful, empowering women, written by men who see women as lesser.
All I can think is these sexist men wrote empowering women by accident, seeing them as ideas & plot devices, in some cases brought to life by talented actors.
I always get a strange, flipped upside down feeling in my stomach when I revisit one of these stories — a story I found empowering & still do, while now seeing the hints & traces I missed when I was younger; clues that the author was dismissing the woman as soon as writing her.