Machiavelli is remembered for the advice he gave in The Prince, rather than for being devious himself. His advice was, as I recall, intended for the Borgia family...and the only one I can remember is Lucretia!
I think the Borgias were the example Machievelli drew upon for his work, rather than being the ones intended to learn from it. Teaching a Borgia about duplicity would be a coal to Newcastle situation, I think! And the Borgia Machievelli knew best was Cesare, not Lucretia.
It has something to do with the roles we assign to them in the course of events. The underlying bias about gender is the foundation of what makes certain roles easier with a specific gender. For example; a role who becomes a victim is doable when it is a woman. A role who is an offender is easily done with a male character. If it's too labeled thinking, please don't push me into the infinite possibilities of defiant ways things work apart from the classic gender projections. I know already. It depends if you want to go with the flow of conventionality or whether it doesn't matter what kind of behaviors your characters take on for the greater whole. Protection for example within the animal kingdom is female behavior by default, not all species I know, but often we see super heroes, who are mainly stereotypical strong men, do the work of protection of the weak. Not saying women are cows, and human nature isn't dependable on these tribal connections with our survival instincts. It's about what's appealing in what you're trying to depict. A female plumber stands out, is unlikely to also run a manicure shop as her second job, but if you're doing this on purpose because it matters or have a story that's full of unconventional things, then do think outside of the box. Other times women are the dominant gender who define what and what not is characterized as male behavior, because the males have to take on certain tasks. Look at penguins, the males keep the egg warm. I don't even know why. I don't think penguins are expected to question this either. My preference isn't very developed. I like seeing eccentricity in characters, while easily adapting traditional traits to the belonging gender without thinking to write. For example: long telephone calls are considered feminine because it's social more then technical and business related. Don't get me wrong; I've had hours long telephone calls with both men and women. Not very adult, so it's a little while ago, but who knows it might happen again, even though I'm no longer interested in that anymore. Where I can be on the phone two minutes and need no more then that, a telephone call with the same urgency replaced and performed by a woman variant might easily last ten minutes. I'm not a specialist, but maybe there are also very brief, seconds long call women make often to compensate for the average, and men only last two minutes. Women can be easy, sometimes it works better the other way around. Male roles might drive the story mainly by evident actions and a few moments of evaluation of the situations and moments of repentance and introspection, female roles might rather drive the story mainly by evaluating their position and taking some deciceful actions as a result of ongoing doubt, introspection and observations. Not sure if this is acceptable to other people. It's not a rule by approach and I might also be horribly wrong.
The Prince was actually a satirical piece written to mock the Borgias, with Machiavelli being being a staunch supporter of republics. It was less advice, more "these are things you've been taught to do and their not right".
I've heard the 'The Prince is satire' idea before, but it's definitely just an opinion, not a proven fact.
