So as a female fan of baseball and OOTP, I think the lack of women players and leagues is a HUGE problem for the game. I don't understand how so much work has been put into making historical and international leagues in this game, but no women as far as I know are in the game or are even able to be created? I think the Dev team should really make this a priority asap on future OOTP projects. Women's baseball is and has always been a thing and frankly
the reason why it is so stigmatized and relatively unknown in the US in particular is due to the lack of representation in media; even when women's leagues or individual players are represented,
they are often portrayed as a novelty which both discourages women from playing and works against the normalization of women's baseball. (There was also a good episode this week of Fangraphs's Effectively Wild podcast that talked more about these issues and current developments that I think everyone would enjoy listening to
)
Honestly as a woman it's so incredibly frustrating to see the blatant sexism that still gets thrown around in public, let alone the material inequality between men and women's baseball.
I think OOTP really owes it to girls everywhere to be on the cutting edge of fixing this narrative and the problem of representation; not only is this a major social issue that OOTP can help fix, they likewise would be tapping into a gaming market which has otherwise been ignored. Looking through this site's archives, I know this has been a question that's been posed for at least a decade on these forums now and I really think it's time for the Devs to listen and deliver on this. It's important socially and to many gamers of all genders personally who play this game.
Some requests:
1) Make women's historical and/or custom leagues playable
2) Allow for co-ed leagues with ciswomen, transfeminine, and non-binary players represented. While we love our male players obviously, I think OOTP should allow for representation for players of all gender identities.
Thank you for reading and I hope fellow gamers on here will support this request
Edit: Thanks for the positive feedback we've received so far! I'd just like to link to a
post later in the thread that I made which hopefully will begin to address some questions and concerns about representing women's stats, performance, scouting scale, &c. in-game based on the work Luisa Gauci and others have begun doing with Driveline Baseball! I hope Devs especially will take a look at this and reach out to consult accordingly ^_^