Can the sexism in these types of games stop?

[MyRedNeptune]

I'm seeing a really common misconception in this thread, to which, unfortunately, the OP didn't seem to direct much effort in preventing.

The perception of feminists as conspiracy theorists is the most common, and sad, feminism-related straw man. Sexism, in its most common form, rarely stems from hatred, deliberate exclusion, alienation, or what have you, but rather the assumptions that we have accumulated in our minds from observing the world around us as we grew up. Therefore, sexism is actually a very natural state of mind.

The conclusion this leads us to is that popular stereotypes, by their very nature, are self-sustaining. A person who grew up reading about, watching, and playing as mostly male characters will continue to expect and replicate the same tropes. When the entirety of society is doing this, you get the exact same environment which had lead to this collective bias in the first place.

Thus it is the job of the feminist movement to break this cycle by raising awareness, placing pressure on the media, and, what's even more important, producing enough hype to provoke a desire in individual people to do something about it themselves. I bolded that because that is actually a surprisingly difficult point. Pretty much everyone is aware of gender issues. But you have tens of millions, or even the majority of your country saying that they are not knowledgeable, influential, or involved enough to do something about it, and what you get is stagnation or even regression.

I won't diminish Frictional Games' reasoning behind their lack of motivation for creating female characters. But they also don't have the grounds to deny that they are part of the gender under-representation problem. Which is also fine, if you simply couldn't care less about it.