The suit would be looking at the RE series and series comparable to it (like Dino Crisis). Revelations sold 1.9 million across 4 different platforms. Most RE spinoffs were only on one platform, didn't feature mainline protagonists (like Jill and Claire) and were outsourced to cheap third-party developers. The top-selling RE games feature male and female protagonists, except RE7 and RE4 which were exclusively male.
RE's commercial history suggests that having both male and female protagonists is more likely to be successful than having an exclusively female protagonist.
Pretend you're a Capcom exec and you're attending a greenlight meeting for a new RE game. The game being proposed has an exclusively female protagonist and is asking for a $60 million development budget. You look at the sales history for each RE game. You see that the best-selling RE games featured both male & female protagonists or exclusively male protagonists. Are you more or less likely to greenlight this game?
The top 2 best selling GTA games of all time had exclusively black protagonists or both black and white protagonists. I'm sure the suits will look at this data to greenlight the next GTA.
/s
You can slice the info in many ways to make a point. I think game devs with a good track record in terms of sales usually let the creatives drive these decisions and the suits stick to paying the bills