The magical girl genre long been an expansive genre that has had a wide variety of shows ranging from Sailor Moon back to vintage anime such as Cutey Honey all the way to Madoka. It's frequently served as a counterpart to shounen anime, except the typical superpowered characters are female. Frequently, most of the series are imbued with a certain sense of idealism which also strengthens its relations with shounen anime. Anime such as Cardcaptor Sakura frequently give off a rather playful relaxing vibe outside the tense moments, and generally comes off as pretty entertaining as such. The magical girl genre is often popular with male viewers because casts with lots of female characters just tend to do this. It also is frequently home to strong female protagonists that aren't as obnoxiously sexualized or suffer from
Faux Action Girl syndrome in which she must rely on a man anyways regardless of power-- which is lame.
In recent memory there have been quite a few notable magical girl anime that have put out some interesting takes on an aging genre. These tend to work better if you're familiar enough with the genre to recognize its twists. Nanoha, for example, invokes a lot of mecha and shounen elements, making it an action oriented fusion of diffrent kinds of show-- making it seinen, actually. Mai-HiME also mixes it with mecha element, but imbuing it with the traits and tendencies of modern anime. Anime such as Uta Kata and Madoka attempt to go for a darker route, subverting the classic idealist thoughts of the series and tempering it with realism, but still acknowledging that these thoughts are still compatible with reality, just in a different way. The former was unique for not using too much fantastical elements, the later by invoking sci-fi horror elements. I haven't really found anything quite like any I mentioned.
As for being able to relate to characters, I don't think it matters too much what gender they are to understand their thoughts, motivation, and past. Otherwise, half of history would be unreadable. Anime people don't really resemble humans anyways but we project human ideals onto them too.