There’ve been a lot of interesting discussions about how Russell T Davies depicts women compared to Steven Moffat, notably, the titles that he gives them. “The Woman Who Walked the Earth” and “The Most Important Woman in the Universe” vs “The Girl Who Waited” and “The Impossible Girl.”
With that in mind, it’s interesting that Davies had Gwen say this. To me it indicates that he quite deliberately desired the female characters to be powerful individuals in their own right.