"A site like this can count its openly female members on one hand (afaik). Is it time to admit that these problems have been baked right into the culture itself? How do we fix these intrinsic issues?"

>Sounds like you consider the imbalance between male-female membership on vgchartz to be a bad thing. You list it alongside ills like sexual harassment and misogyny. Do you consider it a bad thing and if so, why?

It isn't because lack of god.  A majority of religious people can barely stand someone of different sexual orientation and you are trying to act like you have the moral high ground.  It is education and parental upbringing that is the key.   A person isn't born a racist or asshole.  They are taught to be one. 

The "male = bad, female = good" rhetoric prevalent now is as toxic as anything else and there will be consequences.  Female-dominated spaces aren't considered intrinsically negative, the same should be true for male-dominated spaces.  There is nothing to fix.

That being said, sexual harassment is all about power, real or perceived, and a good portion of that can come from being in an environment where one sex is more comfortable or confident than the other.  There should be an awareness of that, I think. 

About a year ago, I was in a situation where I was sexually harassed by two female co-workers in a female-dominated workplace.  They did not feel at risk from their behavior so there was nothing to push back against the enjoyment they got from bullying someone else.  Some of that had to do with current events and the attitudes that are developing in association with that.

For example, one of them said, "you can't tell on us because no one would believe a guy about being sexually harassed by girls," and the other one chimed in with, "right, we'll just start to cry and tell them you were the one harassing us."  They also said, "everyone knows a guy can't be sexually harassed anyway," and, "guys aren't supposed to have feelings."

People are people.  Male, female, or anything else, they are more likely to be abusive when they feel in control.  The focus shouldn't be on one gender or the other, it should be on teaching everyone why harassment is bad and understanding when it is taking place.  It should be taught from the most basic level so that it encompasses everyone by default, regardless of who they are.

The internet is one thing. As long as people get to be anonymous, they will feel free to dump all kinds of shit on other people on the web. This is not a gendered issue, but rather a very inclusive one. Everyone who posts anything will get some conflicting opinions, abuse, hate, or whatnot. However, tampering with peoples' ability and freedom to be anonymous and express varying ideas and opinions with relative freedom would be a bad idea and would inevitably lead to something awful. China is already on that path in many ways. No thanks, the price is too high. So, there will always be assholes because humans are humans. Just brace yourself, think about whether putting yourself out there on the web is something you are prepared to handle, and maybe stay on platforms where registration is required or something. Naturally, it would be nice if everyone conducted themselves in a dignified manner in there, but don't hold your breath.
Then there's the workplace harassment. This is just inexcusable in all forms and shapes. I'm sure it happens in every industry, it's hard to say whether the gaming industry is an extreme case or not. In my homeland people talk about "workplace bullying" as a phenomenon that covers all kinds of behavior and the victims can be anybody really. I guess in male dominated workplaces women tend to get the worst of it, I don't doubt that. Then again, I hear that in female dominated places women tend to pick on each other, but the things they do are of course very different in nature. Again, it's everyone's personal responsibility to behave respectfully towards their coworkers, but given that there will be people who won't, we have to think about solutions. Workplaces are challenges in this regard, because depending on where you are, it can be extremely difficult to fire people if it's difficult to show proper grounds, which of course in isolation is a good thing for workers. Then there's the fact that businesses naturally want to hold on to their top performers and are reluctant to fire them even with their poor treatment of others. A lot of things will be overlooked and tolerated because of this. And so on and so forth.
There's so much more to say but I gotta go.

I think your understanding of the problems at Activision is wrong.  Rape threats and sexual violence are definitely not what this is primarily about.  They're a tiny little sliver of it.  Most of it is your more run of the mill sexual harassment, women being taken less seriously, passed up for promotions, and the like.  

It certainly isn't revealing.  We've known about it for a decade or more.  It is far less than "every other guy" that's a problem, but I get your point.  I think the issue goes back to the anonymity that comes along with online interactions, and the huge numbers of young men (boys, really) in the gaming community. 

That said, the workplace stuff in gaming doesn't seem substantially different than workplace problems in many (most?) industries.  Its getting a lot of attention in the gaming business right now, but these are common problems, and have been for a long time.  

The imbalance in isolation isn't inherently bad, but considering the toxicity in the gaming community it's not exactly a stretch to surmise that female gamers often don't feel welcome to participate and be themselves on sites like this. VGC itself doesn't seem very toxic but the disparity still suggests part of a wider trend where female gamers will avoid or stay anonymous in places like this due to bad experiences.

Considering online forums like this one are generally open to the public, could you point me to some interactions wherein female gamers receive backlash for being themselves and thus are discouraged from participating?

^ i can confirm only setting your profile gender on female gives/used to give you different kind of spam

Wasn't that one user that held that graphics card contest then disappeared really a guy that posed as a female? Brings me back to old WoW days where guys would sometimes fake being female because they would showered with free items, gold, run through dungeons, etc. If anything that's giving special treatment but that isn't the case with all games or forums.  Had a friend that posed as one for a little in Runscape or WoW and he was showered with gifts.

Well, I linked to several such examples in the OP (particularly the third video, forum-wise). If you're talking about VGC specifically, that scarcity of open members of the community and the site's...less than perfect search function makes it difficult for me to relocate particular instances of toxic interactions. Jaicee could probably give you some personal examples if she wanted, as could Onionberry if she were still around. I haven't been active as long as others here but I struggle to recall any other female members I'm personally familiar with.