Gender Balance in Nancy Drew Games

I've been working on a spreadsheet of various qualities in Nancy Drew computer games, including factors like culprit shenanigans, historical period, spookiness level, and Sonny Joon sightings.  One thing that caught my eye recently was how the balance of suspect genders has changed over the years, along with the gender of the culprit.

Guess how long it took for Her Interactive to make a game where there were more female suspects than male?

The answer is 11.  Up until Curse of Blackmoor Manor, there was always either a perfect balance between males and females or a skew towards the males.  Also, in the first 10 games, there were only 2 female culprits. Ironic for a company geared towards girls, huh?

Someone at Her Interactive must have realized this, of course, and games #11-15 all had female culprits and none of them had a predominantly male cast.  However, #16-20 fell right back into the pattern of male-centric casts, and this time it was worse than before. In these 5 games there was never a perfectly balanced suspect pool, the closest being 2 girls in a 5-person cast.  It was also during this period that the first 100% male cast featured (albeit as a one-man show).  In contrast to the company's early days, though, 3/5 of these had female culprits, and it's from about this time forward that the likelihood of a culprit being male or female became roughly the same.

The pendulum swung back with game #21, where there was the first 100% female cast.  #22 fit more with the previous male-streak, but #23 and #25 were both predominantly female with #24 being an even split.

Excepting #27, which was slightly skewed towards the male side (Nico doesn't factor into the calculations because he's dead and not a suspect), every game from #26 onward has featured male and female suspects in equal amounts.  I don't think this is a coincidence--someone at Her Interactive has realized that pushing the gender ratios one way or another will just make them return to the previous pattern with a vengeance.  And, after all, the actual world does have a 50/50 balance between male and female, so why not represent that in the games?