Technically, Officers don't actually have a gender. They all show up as masculine for some reason. As for the rest, I'd say that's something you'd want to just roll with. You can encourage skills to be trained in specific ways by assigning the officer to do the thing it helps with. I.E. Crew training is improved by actually commanding a ship, Fighter operation is through commanding a carrier (I think), so on so forth. As best I can figure some things like a couple of the Task Force Officer placements are only raised by being in those roles.
I'm still not entirely certain what diplomacy, operations, and intelligence are supposed to do.
Diplomacy is the skill used to create the composite rating for diplomatic teams. Operations and Intelligence are used by TF staff members to increase the bonuses in those areas (though I can't remember what specific stats they affect).
Operations, as in fighter ops? If so it affects the effectiveness of all sub 500T vessals, and intelligence is the stat for espionage teams and so forth. Which can steal tech, and thats about it. If I remember rightly.
Operations is different from Fighter Operations. Also, the skill for Espionage is just Espionage. Maybe Intelligence has to do with performing interrogations on ship survivors?
Diplomacy also has some kind of role in a fleet staff, which is what I meant when I said I didn't know what it did; sorry, I was kinda foggy went I wrote my last past, so I misspoke. For wild mass guessing, I suppose it could logically be if you've got the fleet in a system held by another faction it could make them slightly less pissy at the fact you're in their space without permission? Maybe.
Also, PTTG??, if I can make a suggestion for you regarding Beam fighters, I'm noticing I've got two doctrines that really developed in my current game. Gauss fighters, which are intended more for chewing things up and minor point defense, and Reduced size laser fighters. I'm at a reasonable tech level right now, so even with a 75% reduction on the 10cm I can get a ROF10 off it, but having the laser fighters available really helped with some specific enemies that like ignoring armor. Getting it down to 250 tons took some... judicious trimming in areas of fire control and powerplant, though.
Oh, and as a random note? I discovered a very interesting bug and reported it, but I don't know if it'll be fixed or not; if you have fighters in a carrier's bay that have been configured to run point defense, they'll actually calmly use individual box launchers to swat things... and somehow I managed to get them to do it while docked. I think it had to do with me pulling them back in while they had fired, but I'm not sure.