The real problem with the "women are half of gamers" thing they cling to is that it uses gamer in two different senses and elides this fact to try and make an otherwise easily rejected moral argument. (And considering it's Era, probably also uses woman in two different senses, it's obvious they don't mean trans women with it.) "Gamer" still exists as enough of a subculture that you wouldn't include someone who plays something on their phone when bored of any sex and arguably shouldn't count the same for someone who plays a few hours on the weekend or whatever. But, in theory, it could get there. It's like if you asked someone "are you a television watcher?" Both someone who watches a few sitcoms and the news and sports along with someone like Era who binge watches every childrens cartoon and everything else on Disney+ while subscribed to every service would be included in this because the entire culture has been democratized.
But console sales numbers alone prove gaming hasn't reached this point. This generation plus the Switch hasn't passed the United States population alone. And how many of those are sold to the same person, let alone the same household? There's no way to measure mobile gamers, and probably even PC gamers, except with the less specialized more broad version of gamer that matches television. (Time spent playing won't tell us as long as we consider Wordle or Solitaire different from Call of Duty Mobile or whatever.) Actually, a better comparison than television (which democratized so long ago) might be home video watching. The VHS was a luxury thing that only a few people had for a while, but it became so democratized that they literally built buildings where people could come and rent these things called "tapes" and watch them at home only to return them to the building. We never even called people DVDers or BluRayers and never got into specifically naming people who stream video because it was adopted pretty much in the blink of an eye. The whole thing has smushed down to even someone telling you they watched a movie doesn't tell you the format they viewed it through, it could have been on broadcast, cable, they used a disk or old tape, they streamed it, they pirated it, etc.
Gaming clearly remains a specialized market about a particular "format" that has mainstreamed more than it used to but not democratized. Trying to suggest otherwise is either obviously attempting to manipulate people into altering the "culture" which is dumb for separate reasons or just stupid business advice like advising Ferrari or Harley Davidson based on how many overall vehicles are sold. Yes, in theory, you could sell to the overall market but that's not exactly why you do what you do in the first place. It's probably that "gamer" is too broad of term and we're just used to it in the more specialized sense, eventually a replacement for either will come about, most likely the specialized market. I recommend going back to "vidhead" or some other condensing/cringe term we can unearth from the 1980's.
