The bottom line here is simply that people will look for any reason to complain about something that seemingly violates political correctness for attention, and political favor. There is nothing at all wrong with this ad, but if someone screams sexism, they can of course get attention for themselves, and what's more it provides an excuse for the feminist movement to bellyache about something given it's genuine lack of legitimate issues, it's actual battles having long since been won and the people empowered politically by it needing to find reasons to justify their own positions and keep their power bases fixated on them.
To put it bluntly, even if one argues it's a "negative" stereotype (OMG, a woman doing housework, how horrible!), it's no worse than how men are portrayed in other advertisements where they are schlubs who can barely rub two brain cells together that always get one upped by their far more clever, and savvy wives/female interests without whom they could not possibly survive.
As far as the perception that girls are largely interested in casual games, well yeah, there is some truth to that as well. This does not mean that there aren't girls who are hardcore gamers, just that they are pretty uncommon. To be honest right now like 5-10% of gamers out there are REALLY serious gamers, the rest of the people playing might see themselves that way but ARE actually casual gamers. What's more things like facebook and phone apps have been outgunning traditional game development, as the gaming media itself has been harping on for a while.
While also unpopular I will also point out that while there are a lot of girl gamers out there now, it WAS at one time as male dominated as the stereotype implied. Girls became a bigger prescence in gaming when games started to go mainstream and casual games started to boom.
But then again, I'd also point out that many games thought of as being "Hardcore" are actually casual experiences. Shooters are a good example of this, while the material might be fairly graphic, they are really no differant than Farmville on a fundemental level, filling a similar role but for a differant target audience. As anyone who complaints about XBL will tell you, these games are perfectly approachable to kids as young as like 9 years old, whether they should be playing or not is irrelevent to the point that they CAN play the, figure out the game, work the controls, and fully grasp what's going on pretty intuitively.
Maybe 47% of the Australian games market is women, heck I'd say it's probaly 50-50 throughout most of the civilized world for that matter, seperated by a few percentage points. However the vast majority of those players of either gender are casuals. If you start looking at the little actual serious gaming still out there, you will find some girls involved, but it wouldn't be anything like the overall gaming percentage. We could argue why that is, but wouldn't come to any real answers. While I'm sure they are out there, ask yourself when the last time you've seen a girl who was seriously into "Roguelike" games, like say Nethack or ADOM... The kind of game that is complex, brutal, and typically doesn't have much in the way of visual eye candy. The kind of game that has your typical "Halo Rules" player scratching their head, not finding any visual candy or immediate gratification, and then declaring it sucks or is "too retro" to go back to shoot off guns while engaging in back and forth potty mouth with 9 year olds. This is just one kind of hardcore gaming (mentioned because such games still have a thriving community) but it's a point to consider when making judgements. While they are there, you don't find many girls, kids, or other similar, profitable groups engaged in those kinds of games. Attempts to add graphics and such to the roguelike concept has generally gone along with an extreme simplification of gameplay. What's more especially when looking at the games running off of ASCII (which are still incredibly popular) it should be noted they exist almost entirely as an intellectual exercise consisting of pure gameplay and learning, rather than being dependant on a lot of flashy graphics and sound.
This is getting increasingly off subject, but really the overall point here is that the complaints are stupid, both in a general sense, and also if you want to try and make claims about the division of the gaming market. The people trying to make arguements about the numbers and percentages probably don't even know what those numbers are, what actually constitutes a "hardcore" gamer, and other things.
I find it lulzworthy to have someone pointing to Arkham City (in the commercial) as an example of "serious" gaming, because while it's fun, it's actually a pretty casual experience. While you can do a lot of impressive things in it, honestly it's a game where it was designed so even an incompetant can complete the story without getting into any of the really advanced skills. It's basically one button combat, with a single evade command that can be entered much like a quicktime event since unless you intentionally make things rough for yourself all the bad guys telegraph their moves with a decent amount of time to respond. It's a big budget game, but also a very approachable one designed to be played by just about anyone with brainwave activity, in the end it doesn't wind up demanding a whole lot of it's players.
