Hi SnowyEyed
I see your point re: the minifigures not being particularly gendered, but when I was counting the numbers of male and female figures (God, I need to get a life) I was using the official minifigures.lego.com website, where there's a little blurb about each of the characters. The ones I called 'male' were the ones referred to as 'he', and the ones I called female were the ones referred to as 'she'. All the ones referred to as 'she' did have different facial features, like shaped eyebrows, lashes and more prominent eyes.
It wasn't based on my own perception of male and female roles, clothing, appearance etc.
These are the figures put out in the last five years, again, the time period when Lego itself acknowledges that they were marketing for boys. I remember loving the minifigures as a kid, when my brother and I were Lego obsessives, and they were all identical, plain :) faces. I agree that the classic yellow Lego head doesn't look like one or the other, and there's no reason that kids can't play with it as a female character. But sadly that's not because Lego is trying to be gender-neutral or inclusive. Most of them don't look like that anymore; they've either got five o'clock shadow, or eyeshadow and lipstick to indicate which gender they are.
There are a handful of non-human figures (robots, aliens) that don't look particularly male or female, but these too are referred to on the Lego website as 'he'.
I'm afraid that the introduction of these new, different-looking, differently-shaped, skinnier figures to represent the females is going to mean that the blocky, classic, normal version is now going to be used for male figures only. I'm curious to see whether the new shape will be phased in for female figures outside the 'Friends' series.