I think most of that is in how they're presented. Like I said, this isn't all pink sparkles and rainbows, which I think is what usually repels most young boys (and some girls no doubt.)
Which is only because boys are socially conditioned to see "girly stuff" as beneath them, which is the fault of adults for teaching them misogyny. There's no intrinsic reason why boys should have anything against pink sparkles or rainbows. Hell, I like rainbows; rainbows are beautiful. Who doesn't like rainbows? And before WWII, clothing companies actually promoted pink as a masculine color and blue as a feminine one, because pink was a variant of red and was thus perceived as strong and aggressive, while blue was "cooler" and thus gentler. Which just goes to show how arbitrary and artificial these perceptions are.
Really, when I was a kid in the '70s, there were plenty of toys that were assumed to be fine for both boys and girls. I didn't want to play with my sister's dress-up dolls, and I don't think she was into my toy cars, but we played together with stuffed animals and Legos and Lincoln Logs and my Mego
Star Trek toys and so forth. But by the '80s, toy companies and retailers were pushing distinct gender categories for toys harder than before, as some sort of outgrowth of merchandising logic that narrowly marketing products by demographic subgroup was better. I remember being offended that all the male villains She-Ra fought on her show were marketed as part of the He-Man toy line, with She-Ra and her female friends just being dress-up dolls with combable hair. It was ridiculous to think that She-Ra needed He-Man to fight her battles for her. Hell, She-Ra fought Skeletor's
ex-boss! She was fighting evil an order of magnitude greater than He-Man had to worry about, and had no trouble holding her own. And her civilian identity was a resistance-army leader in her own right, not some pampered layabout prince.
I think most will just see it as more Star Wars and will like or dislike it based more on the spaceships and lasers than the gender of the characters.
I'd like to think they'd like it based on the
personality of the characters. After all, stories about spaceships and lasers aren't that interesting if the people inside the spaceships and the causes they're firing lasers at each other for aren't interesting. And characters like Leia, Ahsoka, Sabine, Rey, and Jyn are popular because of their personalities, not their chromosomes. (Although I don't mind admitting that I appreciate how beautiful they all are.)
