I will slightly counter BoB here by recalling an article in an old game informer from an itnerview with the Gearbox guys after Boarderlands launched. They spoke about how there was more pressure on them trying to make females physically attractive. So for some developers, there is an active goal to do so.

They basically said that when dealing with men they have a lot more leeway with design, where they were afraid if their female was unnatractive it would reflect badly on the character.

Mind you, it is hard to say how much of the pressure they felt was justified. It's kind of like the female leads in games issue, where they don't get the same level of marketing or sales other games do. We don't see them marketed as highly, and generally undersell compared to others. Is this due to marketing not being there, or is it due to a female lead not selling well regardless of marketing? Since we hadn't really seen many games at all with females be heavily marketed, it's almost impossible to determine. (Well, now we have Tomb Raider hitting the 3.4Mil mark in sales, a great number regardless of Squares inability to judge their demand properly, so it may well be more on the heads of the publishers in this case. The issues behind Remember Me's developement tending in that direction as well I think. VG charts did show 40K sales on the 8th, a day after release in NA, for what it's worth. Not sure of the current number.)