I will not meet a lot of females in my age bracket playing video games, except of course solitaire and sodoku on PDA's and computers.
In the next decade, I believe gaming will be around 65/35 with males being in the majority. Games now are more than just blasting pigs away and yelling 'cum get sum!'. If you know where that reference is from you know that we have been waiting nearly a decade for the next installment.
I'd have to say Duke Nukem..? I think they've tried some sequels with very limited success.
I do know for a fact that there is certainly an increasing number of women working in the games industry (and I'm not just talking about licensing and marketing, but actual developers). In fact we just hired a female tools programmer at the start of the month. We have several others involved with animation, system design, production/management, etc. I can say that 10 years ago, this was seldom the case, and it is still certainly a male dominated field.
The real trick to getting more female gamers is developing more "cross-gender" product initially, and targeting a younger female audience in general. Unfortunately this demographic has not proven itself (financially), so it is pretty difficult to get a publisher to fork over millions to R&D game play systems that bias towards the female gamer. The few exceptions might be some of the Mattel products from several years ago (before they got sued), but that's only because they were only try to extend their existing market into the interactive space (Barbie Make Over, etc.). Other games like the "Sims" are sort of gender agnostic by design, but seem to end up with a stronger female fan base than male. I sort of think that guys avoid the Sims because they're perceived as "chick games".
We often run into similar issues (perhaps slightly more complex) when trying to develop North American product that also needs to have appeal in Asian territories. In this case you're dealing with an entirely different set of values and interests. At least Asia is a known $$ market, so we get some $$ to develop for it.
Just my .02
-Gabriel
