My gaming experience started with a Macintosh graybox thing at elementary school, then it was the atari, but my fondest memory was with NES and Tetris. See, the thing was, there were simply no divide for gaming between the genders when I was growing up. I've a cousin that dove instinctive to save the NES when the cabinet it was on collapsed somehow. We still tease her to this day about her worrying more about a console than her own safety. I lived in one of the skyscraper apartment as is common for non-upperclass families in Hong Kong, so kids on the same floor simply just play together after doing homework.
NES was the glue that had us together as we rotate through the different apartments (shoebox apartments were already a thing back then) where people play different things. Girls tend to like playing tetris, ice climber and that penguin in antarctica thing where you try to dodge obstacles and stuff. The guys were divided playing vertical plane shooters, tetris, that balloon popper thing and I think popeye? Can't really remember. But the thing was, we didn't care about the genders, if you happen to feel like playing X game, go to here, feel like playing Y game, go to this place today. Girls have different taste in games, that's all. But when it comes down to tetris (and the spontaneous Tetris neighbourhood tournament, where the entry fee was literally a dime), the game was on, even the adults joined in after work. The winner gets to grab a jar of those hawkthorne or other cheap bunk candies at the local herbal pharmacist/drugstore/convenient store and just share it with everyone. For us, and for the adults (some of which are now avid Candy Crush and that digging game by the same company, people that are literally in retirement homes), gender was never a factor. We had fun, that was that.
It was a different story with DnD and MTG, gender didn't play a matter, but if you are caught playing it, you are either sent to counseling, detention or suspension. But that was after moving away from HK and to Canada.
From what I noticed, the divide first started western companies specifically targeted the teenage male. I think it is the result of magazines purchases being primarily done by stupid guy that buy it for the "legal porn" (maybe it's just my area, but a lot of boys were curious about shit like playboy, even softcore porn were hard to get back in the days). Teenage boy became the primary consumers of these game magazines which no doubt influenced publishers into targeting them as well. For example, game magazines will do survey of their readers, it will turn out that it's mostly a male demographics, because girl simply don't care about these magazines that feature mostly eyecandies. That eventually caused more games to be made catering to the younger male population, as the industry grows to eventually hit mainstream, that core components of their business model stayed. With more awareness and marketing dollar thrown out there, it gives the illusion that there are no girl gamers.
On the flipside, you've the phenomenon known as Ragnarok Online. It was arguably one of the first widespread MMO, you might not have played it, but I'm pretty damn sure you'd have at least heard of it. The amount of girls that were in that game is unbelievable, but a lot of them opted to play as guys (same reason why girls opted to play as girls), so few people aside from people that actually know the player themselves know that. I noticed that there were trashtalk saying that there are no girls on it, but that seemed to be from mostly western players (we simply know that isn't true for eastern players, hell, some of us were in guilds where girls outnumbered guys 2:1). One thing I did learn is that different sexes have different preferences. The girls and some guys were OBSESSED with getting hats and accessories (one can even argue that this is the origin of the TF2 hats collection feature ;P), while others were just after the best items/cards/highest level.
Move forward a few more years, the industry is now mainstream. Publishers are teetering on being wiped out with the new digital format. Mergers, acquisitions, bankruptcy, and so forth are common place. Publishers are forced to create games that will guaranteed profit, so they acquire a risk-aversion behaviour. According to their data, young male make up the largest pie, so they make games that cater to them. It boils down to raw, business decisions. Publisher will go where there is demand. It's a sort of chicken and egg problem, consumer wants something, creators provide that something. An outside voice with a political agenda demands the creators to provide something that there's little obvious demand for, demands that can very well tank the company. These outside voices hold no stakes in the creators (or maybe even wishing for their downfall), it's one thing to ask for a product to cater to x taste, it is another to force (yes, force, using bad PR and such) a creator to change their games that were obviously targeting one audience to focus on another group that might not (or outright, don't) have interest in that particular genre.
The only divide in gender is just a matter of taste, but business decisions + "activists" that's forcibly trying to change contents being produced have made it into an issue about genders. Want an easy sample? Demo an action game and a puzzle game, there will be obviously be some difference in the people crowding around the two demos. But it will be crowded by both genders nonetheless.
