There is a Let's Player for a game called Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance who realized the game has an instance of arbitrary, blatant sexism where the bereaved daughter (Mist) cannot kill The Bad Guy even if she gets lucky and stats up enough she theoretically COULD because the game very arbitrarily mandates that she is not allowed to carry the one and only weapon required to kill The Bad Guy. Only the bereaved son (Ike) is allowed to kill him because Mist cannot use THE weapon due to completely arbitrary No Girls Allowed bullshit.[1]
My understanding is the Let's Player realized this because of a run in which Ike ended up a pathetic weakling loser due to RNG bad luck and Mist ended up a real badass who absolutely could have won IF it were not for this instance of No Girls Allowed Blatant Sexism bullshit.
Normally, Ike is the badass and Mist is a weakling healer type. This largely mirrors real life where men typically are bigger and stronger than women but not always.
This is a game instance where if you know enough about the game, it is blatant sexism with zero justification. I am starting this post with this because in both games and real life, it's the exception, not the norm, for it to be possible to say unequivocally "This is some sexist BULLSHIT."
Normally, Mist would not be physically capable of killing The Bad Guy even if you didn't arbitrarily have a sexist No Girls Allowed rule. Real life often works much the same where it's unclear why a particular woman didn't get hired or otherwise didn't succeed on par with the guys.
My ex husband was career military, so he did have skin in the game for thinking about such things regarding the military and having strong, informed opinions. His opinions were shaped in part by being on the small side and career infantry and in part by having carried a woman's pack in a military school so she could keep up and the team could complete its objectives on time, even though he wasn't a very burly individual himself.[2]
His opinion boiled down to: If women want in the infantry, they need to meet the same standard as men. No girly pushups or similar exceptions. If you can't hack it, he didn't want you in his unit.
Note that firefighters are required to be able to do a fireman's carry and the result is that female firefighters have to lift weights to be able to do the job. Male firefighters don't necessarily have to work out to keep the job. Some are just big guys and can haul your ass out without being a weightlifter.
My ex husband was only like five foot eight and 140 pounds and lifted weights in addition to doing PT because he was mechanized infantry and might need to lift a gun part[3] that could weigh up to 100 pounds and, no, you don't get to wait until the guy who is six foot two is available. In a war zone, he might even be dead already.
My ex told me that in Canada they let a hundred women train for the infantry under the same conditions men must meet and only two graduated.
One woman promptly quit because it was too hard and never went to a military unit. The other went to a military unit briefly and quit a few weeks later because it was too hard.
She thought they were kidding and the JOB would be easier than the TRAINING. She thought it was a form of hazing, basically, and that the actual job would be something more tolerable.
It wasn't.
MEN get through special forces training one day at a time or half a day at a time or one hour at a time because it's GRUELING.
So far, I have more or less handled subjects like equal pay for equal work delicately because I know most women want to believe that sheer, blatant sexism is holding them back AND I also know that it's hard to prove otherwise.
The same factors that obfuscate sexism also obfuscate the fact that sometimes women just are NOT really able to keep up and do what the men are REQUIRED to do.
This is partly because humans routinely use proxies for metrics. Unlike games, there is rarely a clear bright line hard number ("game stat") you can put to a lot of real life things -- or if there is, no one has as yet determined what that number objectively is.
Women complain a LOT about being paid less than men and routinely chalk it up to SEXISM, but many women would never willingly endure what men are routinely expected to take without complaining about it as part of having a well paid career.
Women can throw in the towel if they don't like it. Men can't.
About 90 percent of the homeless population in the US is made up of homeless MEN and homeless men typically have no sex life. If you are male and not cutting it, society doesn't give a fuck about your sorry ass.
Too bad so sad. Get a job, loser. No, your family probably doesn't want to take you in if you are failing as a man.
In contrast, women can marry well or shack up with someone or go home to family if they can't cut it and they frequently DO exactly that.
So my husband was a little guy who lifted weights to be able to do his job and he felt "Women can join my unit if they can meet the standard. No one is cutting ME any slack for being a little guy. I have to be able to do the damn job, no excuses."
And I felt that was reasonable and evenhanded and I respected his opinion on a subject I didn't personally study and didn't personally have skin in the game because I was a military dependent, not a military member.
See also: I'll make a man outta you
Footnotes
[1] Longer explanation from someone actually familiar with the game. Posted with their permission:
The context here is that Ike and Mist are siblings, the Black Knight murdered their father toward the beginning of the game, they're both so mad about this they actually ran on ahead in pursuit of the Black Knight, foolishly leaving their allied army behind, and so it's a separate mini-mission where only Ike and Mist are on the field in terms of player units. The Black Knight's armor is divinely blessed so only a divinely blessed weapon can penetrate it, Ike scooped up such a divinely-blessed sword way earlier in the game and has not been using it for no in-character reason since he picked it up and only breaks it out now.
The game itself operates on a fixed unit class system that controls what weapons a character can wield. The magic death sword is a Sword, Ike can use Swords, while in Mist's base class she just uses magic staves to heal people... but units can 'promote' into a higher class, boosting their stats and gaining new capabilities, including the ability to wield new weapon types, and Mist has a completely unique promoted class that specifically picks up the ability to equip Swords. So by general game mechanics, by default she logically is relegated to healing Ike while he gets revenge by swording the Black Knight, but if you got her promoted then by general mechanics she ought to be able to wield the sword... and has enough in-character motivation for seeking revenge she did in fact run on ahead with Ike and the devs wrote up dialogue for her fighting the Black Knight ("You... you took my brother and my father! My sword may not even scratch you, but I don't care. This one blow... will contain... all my anger... and all my pain... Rrrraaaaa! I'll kill you!") even though this is designed to make no sense to ever see... and the game uses a randomized growth system, where how well a character turns out at a given point in the game is pretty variable. In this LP, Ike turned out awful and Mist got great stats: the LPer commented that if the Black Knight wasn't just immune to all non-blessed weapons, Mist would do twice the damage as Ike by using a magic sword that actually runs off the Magic stat, and if Ragnell (The divinely-blessed sword) used Magic for its magical ranged attack (Which would make more realistic sense than its magic death wave running off Strength) she'd also be the better choice for wielding Ragnell!
But Ragnell is locked to Ike (and its mechanics are designed for that purpose) as an arbitrary exclusion: unlike most plots with divine swords and similar, Ike wasn't Chosen By Fate, he didn't Pull The Sword From The Stone, the sword didn't Choose Him As A Worthy Bearer. From an in-universe standpoint, the sword is wieldable by anyone. So the inability to give Mist Ragnell is 100% arbitrary in multiple senses.
This is the update where he hacks the game to let him equip the magic death sword on Mist (And also hacks her stats way high) and has her kill the Black Knight. (Search for 'Wroth of God-Mist' to get to it quickly: it's near the bottom)
[2] My ex husband was also not happy about the military changing PT standards for incoming recruits but not existing members his age. This was unfair to him and others like him, the justification was BS and, more importantly, it undermined Mission Readiness.
When he joined the military as a shrimpy teenager, they issued him extra rations to try to put weight on him and worked him harder. They didn't say "Well, you don't have to actually meet the standard because you're just too small."
But these days the American military has thrown in the towel on expecting new recruits to meet the old standard and changed it, but only for young new guys. The old guys in the military STILL have to measure up because "logic."
Actual reason: We are no longer a nation of farmers and a lot of eighteen year olds are couch potatoes. Same reason the construction industry has trouble hiring enough people.
And the enemy doesn't care that you grew up playing Nintendo instead of football. They will happily kill you dead and not cut you slack.
My ex, his father, his paternal grandfather and someone in every generation of his family going back about nine hundred years to The Crusades were all career military. He took this stuff extremely seriously and knew his stuff.
If women don't need upper body strength to do the job, why do the men have to meet that standard? If it's not actually needed, isn't it a form of gender discrimination to require it of the men?
[3] "Gun" in the military means artillery or similar. They mean "big guns," not firearms.
If you are in basic training and call your rifle your gun, they will (or did back in the day) publicly humiliate you by having you sing "This is my rifle (point to rifle), this is my gun (point to penis). This is for shooting. This is for fun."
Because using terminology inaccurately in war gets people killed. They aren't just being assholes to make sure you learn that distinction and never forget it.