Hi,
You have complete control over this, to change it as you desire with the encoding before the title then look for this in layout.master file of the skin:
<head id="Head1" runat="server">
<title></title>
<portal:MetaContent ID="MetaContent" runat="server" />
change it like this:
<head id="Head1" runat="server">
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title></title>
<portal:MetaContent ID="MetaContent" runat="server" DisableContentType="true" />
DisableContentType as true will turn off the charset that would be added automatically by the MetaContent control, allowing you to put it in yourself.
Note also that there is a difference in what you will see using view source and inspect element, view source should be the raw markup but inspect element can be different because it shows what the browser interprets the markup as, so the browser may show it with the closing /> even if the raw markup does not have the closing tag.
Hope that helps,
Joe