On the other hand, I struggle with the idea that we can accept that a world's multitude of races all have different abilities, but the genders of those races should be exactly equal. If you want to play as a female Breton, you're not going to be the best fighter. If you want to play as a Orc thief, you're not going to be very sneaky. Is one really worse than the other because one involves gender?

The blogger at Guilded Lillies seems to suggest it's a gender issue outside the game as much as in.

I think that for men, when facing the choices of power design advantages where the statistical advantage is something they are looking for, the gender of the character is a secondary consideration. For women, having to choose one over the other is a choice we would rather not be forced to make. What Hines sees in the starting stats difference as offering more choices for players may in fact translate into offering less choices for women players.

Women want to customize their play experience exactly how they'd like it, without the nuts of bolts of statistics weighing them down. On the other hand, some may see this as watering down and rendering moot the choice between genders in the first place. Man, maybe this is why so many devs create games with only one portion of the audience in mind. It's so much easier.

On less stable ground, however, is the Geeky Feminist, one of those obnoxious people who makes men hate anyone who calls themselves a feminist. She complains that all the artwork in the Oblivion manual depiciting the different races are all of men. A valid point to raise, which Bethesda's Pete Hines defends thusly:

“Apparently we drew all the races as males in the manual so that when looking at all the races you were comparing apples to apples, so to speak…We didn’t want to have female Nords being compared to male High Elves and so on. You see all the races, they’re all the same sex, you can compare how they look to one another and decide which you want to be in-game.”

Her response to this is:

The assumption being, of course, that the players will be men. How is a woman playing a female character going to compare and decide which race to be? She has to start the game, change the gender from male to female, and click through the races to know what her character might look like.

There's no bloody assumption, he just said they chose all one gender to make comparing races equal. How will a woman know what her character is going to look like? She looks at the pictures. There isn't such a vast gulf between races that you can't look at a male Argonian and get a general idea of what a female Argonian will look like. She would undoubtedly argue that that's all the more reason for the artwork to include men and women, and yes they probably could've done that. But the fact that they didn't is such a niggling, unimportant issue that the only people who are really going to be bothered by it are the kinds of people who think they're on a crusade every damned moment of their lives for the sake of some holy "ism." She actually speculates, without irony, that it could've been a deliberate attempt by Bethesda to "dismiss women who would potentially play the game." Ugh.

Source: Gamers With Jobs