Drivers are almost entirely male. If you list all the world's female drivers, they're still so relatively few as to be just token females. That isn't to say that they can't have an option for a female driver rendered in the game, but the focus on males is obviously due to the fact that virtually all race drivers are male.
There have been just
five female Formula One drivers in the entire history of F1. Among them they have collectively started 29 grands prix, with zero poles, zero podiums, zero wins, zero championship wins, and only one of them earned any points at all - Lella Lombardi earned half a point.
I have less precise information regarding
female NASCAR drivers (mainly because I just don't follow NASCAR at all), but there can't have been terribly many because I never hear of them. The ones that's in there must be in lower series, at least in general. For example, in the case of the overhyped Danica Patrick ("DP" as I now like to call her), I'm not aware of her yet climbing above the Nationwide series, which is still up there but not the top series. If there's been hundreds of NASCAR drivers over the decades and various series, and a few dozen have been female, that's nothing and little more than a footnote.
Wikipedia seems to list as many as a whopping
six female rally drivers; that's not in recent years but altogether. There doesn't seem to have been very many
female Indy drivers, either.
But, yes, they're technically in there. Again, I have no problem with having an option to render a GT driver as female. I'm just saying there's a reason they didn't feel the need to bother.
Now, for the really unpleasant part: "great female drivers". All joking aside, when people throw praise at female race drivers, it's generally with a connotation of "she does well for a female". Their performance and praise is generally in regards to them as a female driver specifically, rather than as a driver in general.
If Danica Patrick had instead been Daniel Patrick (male), nobody but the strictest of Indy fans would know who it was. The reporters make a habit of walking back to 27th on the starting grid to interview Danica Patrick, but nobody would give two craps about Daniel Patrick starting 27th on the grid. People don't praise her for being a top driver, but for being a top female driver. Being a top female driver isn't quite the same as being a top driver.
It's always been a friggin' joke whenever people talk about Danica in Formula One because she just isn't F1 material, plain and simple, but I do want to see her in a F1 car in an F1 race so she can fall flat on her pretty face in front of 600 million F1 fans and 200 nations. They'll need special members of the pit crew to run up and wipe the tears from her eyes when she sobs over things being too hard.
Looking over DP's Indy car seasons, she's finished 12th, 9th, 7th, 6th, 5th, 10th, and is presently 11th in 2011 so far. So, her very best season was 5th place, and she's averaged 8.6th so far in IRL. Sure, that's decent, but not normally quite well enough to be "great". That's just "great for a female driver", which again isn't the same.
Let's average the performance of all 2010 female IRL drivers (doing so because it was a completed season, versus what I was originally going to do and use 2011). I'm not going to count drivers who only did one or just a few races, because of course they're going to rank at the bottom. Danica Patrick finished 10th in 2010. Milka Duno finished 23rd. Simona de Silvestro placed 19th. Sarah Fisher was 26th. Between these four they averaged a finish of 19.5th for the 2010 season. That's not terribly good when one considers that many of the 2011 IRL participants only participated in a few individual races and only 24 drivers joined in more than half of the season's events, and only 22 were there for all of them. This means 2010's IRL female drivers averaged in the back. So, while Danica specifically does alright, IRL's female drivers in general don't do so well relative to their male counterparts.
Now, one could try to argue that there's males at the back. That's true, there are, but they're also in the middle and they're also at the front. They don't
average at the rear. They average around average rather than averaging toward the back, as common sense would suggest.
Look, I
know this isn't going to make me very popular. Hate me if you like. I'm not going to lie to you, though. I just tell it to you straight, whether it's good or bad. The truth is that while some female drivers have enjoyed some degree of success, in general they don't do so hot.
