I’ve had plenty of experience being around girls who openly like anime, as well as for that matter being a girl who openly likes anime. What I can say is that most girls who like anime that I’ve met in person have liked broadly the same anime as the boys who like anime that I’ve met in person, stuff like Attack on Titan, Delicious in Dungeon, Spy x Family, Love is War, One Punch Man, and Fullmetal Alchemist — the latter I believe is actually a bit more popular with girls than boys! One girl I took a class with was really into Lupin III, too, which I found somewhat striking.

But yeah, as a whole, popular anime is popular in general. That while men and women tend to approach media with different life perspectives, this doesn’t necessarily mean that men and women enjoy entirely different media. I do however think that the magical girl genre save Madoka Magica tends to lean more to girls than to boys, like I’ve seen girls with Cardcaptor merch, and one girl I know even has a Sailor Moon wallet, but I also think a lot of boys would be ashamed to admit they’re really into Precure. (Arienaaai!)

Of my female relatives who openly like anime, one cousin likes Evangelion and Lain, the other cousin likes Ghibli movies and the Summer Wars film, and my boomer mom likes broadly the same anime as I do: a lot of your standard CGDCT and iyashikei as well as most things KyoAni, and stuff like Girls & Panzer, Konosuba, Aggretsuko, Ranma 1/2, Komi Can’t Communicate, Sakura Quest, Samurai Champloo, Cowboy Bebop, My Master Has No Tail, and a lot of the broadly popular things already mentioned, i tak dalee i tak dalee.

However I will say that I think that our anime preferences are maybe a bit different from a lot of girls. CGDCT in particular can be a bit male-gaze-y or otherwise unsavory at points, and while a lot of girls do have a high tolerance for that, a lot of girls do not, and there’s nothing wrong with that. In other words, for all of the girls who can see themselves and their high school days in K-On and really like the show and make fan-art and buy merch or whatever, there is also a number of girls who are completely turned off by stuff like the Sawako costume scenes and want nothing to do with it. So I think that CGDCT can be a more divisive and case-by-case sort of genre with regard to gender, this is just my impression.

So… Yeah. You can find girls and women who are into basically anything. Girls liking anime is not at all an unusual thing. This fact should be apparent from the large amount of anime targeted specifically at girls and women.

Edit: I just wanna quickly recommend the female anime YouTubers Noralities and Red Bard, and I also want to say that I probably wouldn’t have gotten into anime if I weren’t already into Equestria Girls, this My Little Pony spinoff where the characters are all humans. Now granted I was still laboring under the assumption that I was a boy at the time, but I was pretty blatantly channeling my repressed feminine aspirations through a “girly” interest, so, y’know, there’s that. Incidentally anime helped me realize I was a girl, thanks to a K-On inspired dream, so that’s fun.