Personally what I find weird about this whole ordeal is that from my many years of interacting with nerdy (or maybe not so nerdy) women who played computer games is that there exists one franchise that combines the holy grail of complex gameplay (so it can't be dismissed as another match 3 clone), with insane amount of female appeal, both in the number of hours played and the number of people who play it.

And that franchise is The Sims.

Despite the fact that there has been a huge industry push in the last 10-15 years to make a game that draws in tons of female players, there has been no new game in the franchise other than the safe but ultimately unambitious Sims 4.

I've heard a ton of complaints about players about how much better, more complex and featureful the Sims 3 was (and that game was a glorious mess), and Maxis themselves have acknowledged this. I think there has been a sequel in work at some point in time, that promised to bring back the complexity, which has been cancelled unfortunately.

So in a nutshell, despite all the rage around this question, the industry somehow doesn't even make the games that are known to do well with a female audience.

Another example would be Stardew Valley, or Undertale, which had a huge female following (and sales to match) but had to come out of the indie scene, because all these super politically progressive AAA gaming companies somehow are worse at making things that appeal to women than either companies that existed before, or random indies coming from outside the professional world.