Why is this thread making people so angry? Why are so many people going "ya, but Farmville!" and glosssing over the RPGs statistics. Whether or not the sample makes the statistics valid or not is a reasonable thing to debate, but in all seriousness, why are people so angry about this?
Also, if you don't care, and don't think it's important, why post in the thread? I swear, a lot of the attitudes in this thread make it sound like people don't want more women to be gamers.
Anyway, here's my attempt at answering the OP's questions:
1. Because they're more hardcore than us. As far as I'm concerned, you're more of a hardcore gamer for playing RPGs that you are for playing CoD.
Okay, joking aside, I really don't know. I'm a guy and I've always preferred RPGs to shooters (unless the shooter has a lot of roleplaying elements). Maybe it's because shooters typically are played online and women don't really want to interact with some jackass making sexist remarks to them constantly. You might be saying "oh please, you're exaggerating." I'm not. Back when I used to play CoD, my sister wanted to play a match. As soon as she confirmed that she was not a 10 year old boy and in fact was a teenage girl, she immediately had some graphic, sexual remarks made to her by two different people. Maybe she was just unlucky, but I all I know is, I've never had someone tell me that they wanted to "fuck me in the ass" while I was playing a game and yet this was leveled at my sister on her very fist gaming experience. It was really quite sickening.
Yes there's a mute button, but if you have to use it more often than not, there's something very wrong with the situation.
2. Again, this is just speculation, but maybe we like the competitive nature. I'm not saying that women don't like competition, just that maybe men like it more. Again, just speculation, I could be completely wrong.
3. I don't count them. Judging from the percentages, if we stopped counting these kinds of games, men would be the majority again but still, I think the RPG statistics shows that female gamers are only going to become more prevalent. As far as I'm concerned, that's a good thing.
Edit: I had an extra "3." at the end of my post. Must be tired...