Excerpt from said link.
One of the things that's changed between then and now is that women have become much more integrated into the US armed forces and they are edging ever closer to full-on combatants. Even so, it still feels strange to see women warriors, because we're not used to them yet. While science fiction has postulated the fully gender-integrated military of the future for some now, it's seldom portrayed realistically.
Issues of privacy, living situations, and the all important male/female interaction and its impact on unit cohesion and morale are usually just brushed aside as in the Trekkian model of the perfect future where no one sleeps with someone they're not supposed to because Starfleet officers are just better than us. The original Galactica was a product of its time and was obviously sexist in the way even the notion of female pilots was considered crazy until all the men were waylaid by some virus and then (Holy Lords of Kobol!) the women had to fly the Vipers.
I wanted the new Galactica to fully intergrate women into the equation, but not blink from it, not avoid the unpleasant fact that this won't always go smoothly and that there will be problems along the way.
Yep sure sounds like he wasn't considering the PC angle [/sarcasm]
The idea of making Starbuck a woman was literally one of the first things I thought of, and it was in my original pitch to both the studio and the network.
On paper, the Starbuck character, as originally conceved, was a bit of a cliche, even in the 1970s -- the hotshot who does things his own way, chases women, smokes, gambles, drinks, etc., but then always pulls it together in time for a mission and is the best gall-darn pilot anyone's ever seen.
If you know anything about writers, you know how much they love cliche' [/sarcasm]