"Mada, mada dane"

the game has a series of romance side quests involving a female NPC that, absurdly, you can only get if your PC is male. And there's no alternative set of side quests with a male NPC for a female PC.

Gah, that reminds me of something... a game I really wanted to love, but it suffered from programming bugs and really harsh sexism and some racial stereotyping, too. It was an apocalyptic cyberpunk RPG, and one of the (very few) NPCs was a street whore. When you were playing a male character, you got a dialog where she had been beaten up by her pimp and you could "rescue" her by threatening him. She also was the game's healing point (no, seriously, you visit her and your health points are recovered) -- but only when you were male.

When you played a female character, not only did she constantly tell you to piss off (because you're "competition"), thus eliminating the healing factor, you couldn't even rescue her. I played a female decker and waited and waited for the dialogue to pop up, because as shitty and problematic as the "whore with a heart of gold" cliché may be, I still wanted to help instead of letting her stand around with a black eye, you know? Not to mention that I'd be overjoyed to find some actual GLBT content, dammit.

Nothing.

And I could go on and on. It's really one of the worst games I've ever seen or played, and although it's been some years ago, I'm still not over it. *growls*

Which is probably a very long-winded way to say "Yes, I totally agree with you and the OP, and could producers and game designers et cetera finally stop treating women like they had cooties and then whine about how they don't make enough money because for some reason the women don't want to give them theirs?"