I think there's still plenty of room left for more female voice actors and better roles for women all round in games.
There does seem to have been a trend in RPGs to cast women as either housewives, helpless, witches or whores, which does get a bit monotonous.
At leaast the brothel in Divine Divinity was chock-full of NPCs of both sexes... and it didn't matter which your character was or which it picked. But that's a different story!
One of my favorite features of the Divinity games is that the hero character is pretty much exactly the same, whether you pick a male or female avatar. Also, the villians are reasonably well mixed. I'm only in act IV of BD, but it does seem to me that DD was much stronger at giving a healthy balance in the NPCs. (2/5 or 3/7 or whatever of the Black Ring was female, if I remember rightly... though it's been a year since I played).
Better roles for women -- and the treatment of women and of female characters and players in the world of geekery, sci-fi, fantasy, and video games -- interest me, but honestly I'm expecting things to change extremely slowly on that front, because the demographic changes slowly. And I'm okay with that. As I mentioned before, I think any girl who grows up with Star Trek and Star Wars and comic books and PC games really gets used to being "one of the guys" early in life.
But now, back to my original point: Larian is well ahead of the curve by actually writing in the female NPCs and the female hero option. So when giving voice to female characters, why not use a female voice actor? Had the voices in BD taken the Monty Python route, it might have worked. (Hell, I'd love it if they hired Eric Idle, John Cleese, et. al to do the voices, but that's neither here nor there.) But they didn't, and it didn't.
I'm amused and pleased that my "simple suggestion" has spawned such a complex thread!
