Male vs Female Characters

Yesterday I thought (again) on a long, long story (about space pirates) that I´ll probably never write and found out that the "main cast" had five women and two men. Hm. So, to be flexible, why not change one of the women into a man. I went through the cast: the first one wouldn´t work because I wanted her to look fragile (yes, stereotypical, but I think it is easier for a woman), the next one - didn´t work. And I tried, I really did, even went to all the trouble of imagining what the character (male) would look like, how he would act etc., but it didn´t work, because I couldn´t see the male version behaving in the way I wanted it to. (By the way, it´s about a warrior character, ex-gladiator...) Even though I only had a very vague outline of the character´s history, I thought that a man would come out of this differently than a women and in general would deal with the character´s situation differently. But I can´t really explain why (I don´t have that much experience with gladiators or pirates or, more importantly, men), it´s just a feeling.
Then I tried the next character (warrior-mage and assassin) and the transition from female to male was easy, really. No problem at all. (I went back to female, though, for sentimental reasons.)
After a few more tries I started to wonder why there are characters with neutral gender (= you can switch it with no major problems) and ones where that´s not so easy.
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At the end, I went back to my five female, two male characters, but now that I´d tried to change the gender, it seemed to me that I suddenly understood them a tiny little bit better, why they act the way they do and why I want them to act in specific ways. (...considering that I don´t have a specific storyline yet, that´s not so bad.)