Lots of potential distortion, for many different reasons. My "gaming group" consists of 3.5 games running (one of them is irregular at best), and has 12 people across those games. 5 of those players are female. One of the females is a DM for one of the games. So do we break the curve?
I'd assert that we do not at all. Because of those 12 aforementioned players, I'm the only one who frequents EN world (I'm male). The others look at it, but usually only because I've linked them to a relevant article or discussion.
So I'm going to make a broad generalization here (I couldn't resist the pun). My experience is that the girls do not care about joining a larger community, or frequenting one, because they don't enjoy discussing the rules as much. In fact, they generally hate it (so much that we've had to specifically address it) when doing the typical "rules lawyers" activities. They want to play the game, make the jokes, and be with friends. They don't give a burned bra about hashing out the latest "sage advice" ranger preview. Again, this is data taken from my extremely small sample size, so your mileage may vary (and with many good reasons).
But, regardless of the reason, if more girls are playing the game... Why are they not here, and how do you entice them to participate more in the online/global community?
This is still a relatively small sample size, but my experiences seem to be similar. If I'm playing with friends, around half the players I end up with are women. Actually, I think we might've had a game once where MORE players were female than male, but I can't remember. And this is all in spite of being on a college campus with a
terrible gender ratio.
But if I play a game at, say, an Adventurer's League bookstore, there tends to be no more than a couple women, spread across the entirety of tables. So yes, if this is any indication, many women do prefer the game to stay among familiar people. Again, small sample size, but so far nothing's contradicted you.
The rules thing, too, seems consistent with my experiences. I can't remember a time when a female player got on my nerves because they kept bringing up rules objections. There must be some exceptions, but it does feel like the urge to correct other people over minor details is more often found in guys. Again, this varies. I myself tend to play D&D more for the "make characters, be with friends, make and laugh at stupid jokes" side of things, as well as having a strong distaste for getting the most
precise RAW interpretation and the arguments thereof.
It might not be a bad idea to provide a way to filter threads so you can easily separate the rules discussions from more laid-back threads for sharing entertaining campaign stories and player experiences, etc. It's a little discouraging when you're just hoping for some fun D&D-related discussion and a lot of the threads are tedious arguments about rules. If that's an opinion shared by many women gamers, too, it could certainly help even things out a little.
