> There's yet to be a popular race (6 majors, olympics, world championship, even regular "city marathons" etc.) where there's an overall female winner [...]

It wasn't a major city race and probably had a lot of casual runners, but I ran a half marathon earlier this year with around 20,000 participants. A woman won the overall in 1:18:30.

The people who are good at this are just so much better at it than the average person. A fast woman, even if she isn't faster than the fastest men, will still be faster than 99.9+% of them.