Uh, gaining power in a game isn't something I'd tie into gender tbh. Even games made by women often have some sort of progression that involves a player or character getting more abilities or stats, and there are many games by men who lack that kind of progression because the focus was elsewhere.

Experience is usually an easy way to mark one's progress as a character, getting stronger, and it allows developers to send harder things against a player so the game has a consistent difficulty progression. You can see this with both early and modern games where a lot of it is getting stats to be higher so you can defeat that stronger foe. However, I genuinely prefer games to have some balance between gameplay, story, and presentation. If the focus is entirely on gameplay it can definitely fall flat if the only thing there is to get stronger, while if it is only story or presentation then it sometimes might just be better watched than played.

That all said, sometimes that balance can be messed up even after it is achieved. BG3 seems to be approaching a balance BUT a player can still abuse the systems to get more experience than is intended. Pacifisting past gobbos then killing all of them is a viable strategy if one's goal was to kill them anyways but be in a more advantageous position but some people powergame and so they will select the option to get experience for pacifisting and then turn around to kill the goblins for even more experience. Idk if it'd be a good solution but perhaps instead of allowing players to double dip like that they could make it that succeeding at the pacifistic options awards you all the experience you would have gotten killing them while marking them after as providing no or lower experience?