So I figured I would hop in. Humanity in general is terrible, at our roots we are all selfish evil people. Nurture is attempting to civilize nature, and with certain people all the education and corrective actions can only take them so far. I've never seen someone get raped at a LGS or a con, but I am sure it happens. I've seen a ton of guys who creepily go all white night when a female gamer comes into the store (Hello m'lady, let me hold the door for you and pull out a chair for you, and is there anything I can get for you, would you like me to buy you water or some food from the food court, etc. etc. etc.) I've also seen the opposite where a clique of guys make snide remarks or talk trash a bit too loudly about said gamer as well. At my LGS we have a few players who are mentally handicapped, to be honest the same scumbag stuff happens to them if someone is not there to stop it. I live in a pretty racially inclusive area, so we have a large diversity factor, so I don't see a ton of racism, but I imagine if your LGS is in Oregon or Rhode Island when people of color come in they get treated like unicorns and or terrifying monsters.
Changing the appearance or poses of miniatures is not going to make people stop being douche's to women. The only way to stop that would be to act as tough in person as people seem to do on the internet. See a guy harassing a woman playing? tell him to knock it off or get out. See a group of mouth breathers talking about what they would do to her in the corner while she is shopping? Call them out on it. embarrass them more then they already embarrass themselves with whatever chain wallet they are still wearing. (joking, but no seriously, stop wearing chain wallets)
There are a ton of reasons people are the way they are, you won't change them, we can gentrify everything so that we play we flat tokens in appearance similar to checkers, and write missives so that rulesets can only refer to characters as Piece X or Piece 347. And if that's the direction you want to go, awesome, have it, write your own game. The other option is we treat bad gamers, men and women, like we treat cancer, and remove them from the body of the gaming community. Ban them from your events, forums, facebook pages. They will either adapt or move on to something else. Instead of trying to pass the responsibility on to the community at large or game companies, take the responsibility upon yourself and your group of friends / LGS. If you change it there, it will change nationally.