There never was a stigma. Ever.
I'm in my 40s so I grew up in school when the ones was a thing till now and it never been a stigma for girls to play games. From my 40 years as a gamer it was the girls themselves who thought gaming was stupid, maybe 10% of girls I knew actually wanted to play. The other 90% thought guys who played games were nerdy and stupid and thought games were dumb.
Sure some girls may have experienced a stigma. But men faced it way way more back in the day.
My mom played everquest for years when it came out. My best friend she got me into civilization back in the day. My wife is looking forward to me getting a ps5 so I will put my ps4 in the bedroom so she can play mass effect andromeda. First girl I ever kissed when I was a kid and I would spend entire nights switching off levels and lives on the genesis. Lots of girls played games but back in the day most girls didnt want to.
Yes there was. You're actually explaining it away.
Games were never marketed to girls, they were marketed to boys. There are significantly more boy-centric games than girl ones. Even games with female protagonists are chiefly marketed....to boys.
The reason games like Mario Kart, Pokemon, simple cellphone games like Angry Birds, and even more slightly gamer-centric titles like Zelda have larger female playerbases is because the games
and the consoles they're on are generally seen as gender-neutral as far as marketing and gameplay is concerned.
And you're forgetting something -- girls who took gaming as seriously as guys did back in the day faced the
exact same social backlash as the guys did. "Gamer Girl" absolutely was not an archetype that had any marketing power back in the day. But when you combine that with the fact that gaming never really made a conscious effort to market or design games TOWARDS females, it makes it very easy to see why it never caught on for women as hard as it did for guys...hence why 40% is actually a decent sized statistic.
But anyway, this article was posted by Nintendo, who is literally only sharing the information because their marketing strategy is "WE'RE FOR EVERYBODY!", which clearly works, because they seem to maintain a high %age of female players by focusing very heavily on 1st party games with gender neutral design. (Mario, Splatoon, ARMS, Pokemon, ect).
So it's just Nintendo stroking their own dicks, as usual.