Why do people keep on pushing this "moar females" crap onto every major gaming website? Females aren't prominent in "hardcore" gaming(read: the medium buget titles up to AAA) because it is male dominated through and through(most of the programmers and audience are males) and will probably always be, 90% of those games are male empowerement fantasies with varying degrees in quality. On the other hand, women are highly represented on the more casual front, lots of them play mobile,indie games. The Nintedo wii reached such high numbers in sales because its casualised look and feel, with games that could break away from the run and gun/sword and bash that most AAA titles seem to offer and it is no surprised that lots of women love this console. I own pretty much every gaming platform out there but when people in my group are bored, the girls almost always want to play Wii games even when presented with other console options. Argue about stereotypes all you want but IMO it is girls/women that made SIMS the huge success that it was and that was basically an advanced "let's play house" scenario. None of my male friends played SIMS(except for maybe 5-10 minutes to see the hype) whereas my female gamer friends LOVED THE S**T out of it and bought almost every expansion for the SIMS games.
If we want more women into the AAA business side of things then the huge number of women programmers and female audience fanbase will have to come knock on our door with something tangible, not to declare that the medium should change their ways and let them in. The guys making the games would change the way they portray females in gaming if girls/women were a huge part of their audience but THEY ARE NOT. This is something that the politically correct crowd can't seem to get to grips with. Sure, their numbers are growing as opposed to years before but it is still VERY SMALL on the AAA side of things. Simply put, there is almost no female audience to develop for in major AAA gaming. This is the "lost audience" that indies seem to lap up because, without the big publisher contrains, they can be a bit more freethinking in their approach. But big companies need to think about the bottom line and most of their audience IS made up of young males who would naturally have problems identifying with a young girl as their avatar.
For those that don't buy into my narrative, think about the most famous female gaming character: Lara Croft. She is basically Indiana Jones with knockers. She is a girl but the guys playing her don't really feel like they are a controlling a gender different than their own, in fact she is another male fantasy, combining the agility,endurance and overall badass-ness of a popular male character with a heaving pair of bossoms to tittilate them. Sure, you get decent female characters like Jade from BGE but they are VERY RARE.
In my experience, few female gamers behave like most of the guy gamers I know, which is to be interested in many gaming websites, read previews, buy AAA titles, try to be constantly updated on the games industry etc. Most game casually and aren't interested in future trends and such. And the ones that do take gaming a bit seriously are a bit more shuned by their group of female friends as sort of weirdos because "serious" gaming is still seen as a guy thing.
The inclusion of more girls/women into major gaming is a numbers game to me, it has nothing to do with changing attitudes with the drop of a word or two. Once you (somehow) get more women into tech fields, that churn out programmers/game designers and such, then you will MAYBE see a change in how women are represented in gaming because they may be represented on a demographic level, especially on the development sides of things(go to most development offices and it's a sausage fest most times). Until then it's just a couple of girls/women and their internet white knights shouting and throwing rocks at the boys treehouse represented by triple A gaming industry and achieving nothing but page hits in the process.
