Of Swords and Parasols

Suspect the main reason for the change in preference for male children actually had to do with the surge of women entering the workforce (if women can earn money then they can support parents in their old age too, and as my elders often say, daughters are usually more reliable at that than sons), but having women-centric stories probably doesn't hurt either. ^^ Even before Dae Jang Geum, there we're a lot of K-dramas that were women-centric (I did a picspam here of K-drama heroines from pre-Hallyu series, and I'd say most of the series I named there would be considered female-centric), though Dae Jang Geum was ground-breaking in that it had a female protagonist in the male-dominated, male-targeted sageuk genre.