There's a part of that, but the women's stubs are also unjustifiable because of the foundational mandates around sourcing and notability.
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.