Top 10 artificial humans in film
Some science fiction books re-envision and question gender divisions, such as The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) by Ursula K. Le Guin and Dawn (1987) by Octavia Butler, but popular science fiction movies of the 1980s and 1990s are stuck in a pre-Left Hand of Darkness mode that invests artificial humans – both male and female – with emphasized and exaggerated sex characteristics rather than taking the chance to provide a new perspective.
Blade Runner (1982/1992), Tron (1982), RoboCop (1987), and The Matrix (1999) are cyberpunk stories of survival in dystopic worlds, probably targeted at young male audiences like most action-scifi movies, with traditional linear narration styles that focus on the characters. Blade Runner and RoboCop portray human-created machines with intentionally emphasized gender; Tron and The Matrix involve humans and machine-enslaved versions of those humans, and the real ones are reasonably equal but turn gender-exaggerating in the virtual worlds. Each stars a male-female pair with a relationship that sheds light on the themes of the movie. Typically, women embody emotion and comfort while men embody leadership and power, although they borrow from the other side in some situations.
The production of a movie requires much greater economic investment than the production of a book – they are entertainment vehicles and maybe not so much subversion/education, since there is greater economic risk in innovating. Movies are focused on visual effect, and gender has a visual impact.
Deckard and Rachael, Blade Runner (1982/1992)
At a glance: 
male gaze, 
androids/cyborgs, 
violence, 
AI gone awry
Clips: Deckard meets Rachael & Rachael learns she's a replicant
This film centers on artificial bodies ("replicants") built for functional purposes — gender-associated functions, probably for the convenience of the builders. The women are "basic pleasure models" (or can function as them) and the men are "combat models". Rachael is beautiful, with very careful and traditional makeup and hair, styled as a 1980s interpretation of the 1940s ideal woman. Deckard is stereotypical too: the “hardboiled” detective/killer who shows little emotion. Non-artificial human men are in power at Tyrell Corporation and in the police department; the only visible human women are eye candy in Zhora's nightclub or anonymous in the city.
Rachael is introduced as a confident Tyrell Corporation family member and employee who challenges Deckard during his visit. Later, Rachael shoots Leon while Deckard is having trouble defending himself. But once she learns she's definitely a replicant, she falls apart emotionally and becomes a passive and even submissive figure in Deckard's apartment. When Deckard learns he’s a replicant at the end of the movie, he seems to shrug it off.
The replicants are frustrated with their limited lives, denied humanity and self-determination, and want to get beyond their functional sub-types and gendered roles. Leon and Roy Baty are able to kill Deckard (but are thwarted or merciful), while Zhora and Pris resist Deckard's violence but are overwhelmed (and die in skimpy clothing; it is notable that Pris tries to kill Deckard by squeezing him between her thighs). Also, Pris and Roy have a non-coercive relationship but Roy seems to be generally in charge; Pris seems to be a friendly character while Roy is not.
Flynn and Yori, Tron (1982)
At a glance: 
virtual world, AI gone awry
Clip: Flynn and Yori's friendship
In this film, humans get sucked into a computer world and are outfitted in colorful suits that identify them as "programs". These suits don't overly emphasize the gender of the wearer, but it's still obvious — which is a little strange inside a computer where there should be no gender (or bodies) at all, since they're all computer programs. The computer makes them into a kind of digital cyborg, defamiliarizing them a little bit in a world that echoes the power struggles of the outside world.
The primary woman character, Lora Baines, is a scientist in the real world and the girlfriend of one of the male characters. She seems to be an employee on the same level as Tron/Kevin and Flynn, but of course she's pretty and romantically entwined. Flynn plays (and makes) games in the real world and becomes athletic in the virtual world, playing games that require agility and speed. None of the game players appear to be female, and the people running the computer and the corporation are male. Yori is weakened for part of the movie, and she is secondary to the men in most situations, but she is still a central character. At one point Flynn says he won't let her give up – he needs her help.
This relatively benign portrayal of female and male characters is compromised by the existence of a deleted love scene where Yori shows off her interior decoration skills within the computer and conjures up a pretty dress — the only time that computer-world characters would be out of their cyborg costumes. Her femininity is ridiculously exaggerated, but some debate over why it was removed points more toward the suggestiveness of the scene than its silliness.
Murphy [and Lewis], RoboCop (1987)
At a glance: androids/cyborgs, violence
Clips: Fan-made summary & meeting Lewis
The two main characters of this film are Murphy and Lewis, who start out as equal police partners — when we meet Lewis, she's kicking butt. But then Murphy gets blown up and becomes RoboCop, a hyper-masculinized police officer cyborg with giant metal muscles and a deep voice. Lewis is left to try to figure out what happened and helps care for him, bringing him food and sympathizing with his loss of self in a scene preparing for the final battle with the bad guys. She is not physically modified, but her partnership and friendship with a cyborg creates an unbalanced power relationship in a structure that was previously equal.
Murphy as RoboCop is a disrupted body; we are meant to think about how human he is when he does not have much body left, only his memories. But along with what remains of his humanity, what remains of his manhood? He sure looks like a man, with a metal codpiece, but he has been de-genitalized along with being deprived of the rest of his body. He doesn't seem to worry about that though. He is even chivalrous, helping a woman in need. In the final fight, Lewis is injured and RoboCop saves her. The audience never finds out much about what she wants or who she is.
There are other female police officers, but men are in charge in the corporate boardroom and in the police station (which are interconnected organizations).
Neo and Trinity, The Matrix (1999)
At a glance: virtual world, male gaze, AI gone awry, violence
Clips: Meeting Trinity the killing machine & fan-made remix of love scenes
Trinity wears super-tight clothes when she's in the malignant virtual world of the Matrix and loose normal ones in the real world, creating a complex femininity. She probably chooses her Matrix clothes for herself, so she is both the object of fantasy and the product of fantasy, empowered but sexualized. Neo is kind of weak until he gets chosen, where he becomes this sophisticated killer. He is not as sexualized – he wears tight clothes, but they're not shiny like hers.
These are created and disrupted bodies, penetrated by an alien force in a disturbing manner but struggling to be able to control their own lives in the non-artificial world. Trinity and Neo seem to have an equal relationship, even though Neo is the One; they depend on each other and both work for Morpheus. Still, most of the crew is male. There are few significant non-love-interest women.
There are a lot of fan-made montages of Trinity's action scenes with driving beats, and even more montages of Neo-Trinity romance scenes set to cheesy songs. The two characters are presented as both extremly tough and inevitably deeply romantic, but it's possible that this is more of a dangerous vulnerability for her than it is for him.
Why?
This analysis gives all the characters a hard time: a compassionate female character like Lewis may seem stereotypical instead of being a noteworthy sympathetic counterpoint to the violence of a film, and a strong female character like Trinity can't have personal feelings without her toughness seeming compromised.
But paying attention to exaggerated and emphasized gender expression reveals elements on screen that may be otherwise missed: by the end of Blade Runner, Rachael's original self-assuredness is completely forgotten. There are female programs in Tron, but none of them play the games central to the operation of the computer. Lewis begins as the strong half of a partnership and ends up gasping for help from a manly robot. Trinity and Neo wear matching battle outfits except that her clothes are shiny, attracting light and eyeballs.
Title and medium
Popular movies are often gathered into "Top 10" listicles because that's an easy and quick way to generate blog posts, but this list ironically evokes that convention to present an in-depth feminist reading of seven artificial humans plus passing mentions of three more and a bonus analysis of a human.
The web and film are mass media enjoyed by lots of people of all kinds, so transplanting knowledge and techniques from small classes about books to websites about films is a way to contribute to a larger ongoing discourse. The web is all about the visual, and gender is a concern on the web.
Decorative elements
Left, an altered section of "The Harvest Moon" by Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1892), watercolor, which centers on a naturalistic figure of the feminine. Right, "wrought-iron frieze panel, circa 1893" from the Chicago Stock Exchange. These images are included for visual appeal, which reinforces the main text's analysis of the films' attention to the visual qualities of bodies: style is important. Art Nouveau and modernist art, contemporary with early science fiction like The Time Machine (1895), looked to the future and the past at the same time.
The "at a glance" icons come from a set by Yusuke Kamiyamane. The icon descriptions are not supposed to be authoritative guides to the themes of the movies. Instead, they are included as a light way to point out the conventions of genre, the reductive nature of essays and film reviews, and people's tendency to scan online texts instead of reading them.