I dont know, there is a significant noticeable bias towards male representation. Meaty straight white male's are just assumed as the default in gaming. Lacking an option for me to play as a female character in some games particularly RPG's where the character is lacking in any distinct story driven personality discourages me significantly from playing those games.
Games like fable 1 for example discourage me from playing by preventing me form having a choice. While I greatly enjoyed fable 3 because it did. Things are getting better, in general. Some of the smaller AAA developers are starting to get the picture. Especially as females make up a massive segment of the gamer market these days. Other AAA developers, normally the ones with a reputation for treating their customers like mushy excrement haven't changed at all.
As for the gaming community, there is a definite air of misogyny. Women are completely over-sexualised and even treated as sexual objects. In many online games, female gamers act create male persona's just to be treated like equals. There are many stories of how during an online match a male gamer will hurl the standard abuses towards another gamer, but upon learning they are female will ask for pictures of their boobs. Similarly there is the whole gamer girl vs real gamer girl kerfuffle which was entirely pointless but caused the gamer community to wail like they do for anything else. In the gaming community women are not seen as equals. They are not given the same level of respect as any other male in a similar situation.
Now I don't expect to improve the gaming community in any way. Given how they get their panties in an absolute twist whenever the most irrelevant of things happens has shown they are pretty much a lost cause. However, publishers promoting the bias towards men is just bad business. Inclusiveness promotes sales. They wont loose those guys who complain about the option for a character to be female or gay or whatever, because I guarantee those guys will have per-ordered the game already just so they can complain about it.
Just my somewhat more than 2 cents.