I gave an example of enforcement. It takes an editor to flag the article for deletion. Chances are, like the women's footballer stubs up until an editor decided to go through all of them, there hasn't been an editor motivated to do so.
I was at an early Wikipedia meetup and a woman editor told me that women porn stars were more likely to get (and keep) a profile page than a woman sci-fi author. It's pretty clear that Wikipedia's quality has been diminished by this level of misogyny.
Once upon a time, subject-specific notability guidelines carved out exceptions by arbitrarily defining typical notability for a given subject at a lower standard than general notability. Those exceptions are being rolled back toward the higher bar of general notability.
When a women's sport gets 1/10th the mainstream coverage of the men's equivalent, there's no policy justification to have articles under general notability. Even if Wikipedia was capable of banning every editor whose focus is in deleting articles about women (and it's sincerely not capable of banning any of them), the core policies themselves would justify not creating articles — especially for almost all who played in the decades before the recent boom in coverage and investment — because the coverage wasn't and isn't there.
It’s that time pressure gives a great deal of power to anyone with an agenda of any kind.
So for example, per this policy, it's impossible to rewrite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana_Rivers to point out the angle of male violence against women, despite there being sources that exist discussing this, because it's forbidden by policy to refer to this male as a male or use sources that describe him as a man. Instead, the pretence that this is the crime of a woman has to be maintained.