My $0.02, which I know I've thrown out here before: as long as the dev team is mainly composed of white men, WoW will have problems with sexism and racism.

@Zallgrin:

Life also doesn't have magic, or Orcs, the ability to shapeshift, or two-foot-high women with pink pigtails who can shrug off fifteen minutes of blows from a thirty-foot giant with the help of a beefy guy in a dress with green hair and massive eyebrows whose length is exceeded only by that of his ears. Maybe we should remove those from the game and then tell you to deal with it. Because that's how life is.

TL;DR: The point of WoW is to be a fantasy. Why can't we fantasize a world that doesn't reflect our prejudices?

@gewalt:

I didn't order this. Most of the other people I play with, men and women, didn't order it, either.

@Nagaina:

Fistbump.

@pizoni:

Here's a mental exercise for you. Think about all the major lore characters, especially faction leaders. How many of them are male? How many of them are female? What are the temperments of the male and female characters? What kind of abilities do they have? What roles do they fill? Is their importance based on their own abilities or their relationship (blood or romantic) to another character, and what is that character's gender?

What does armor look like on different genders? What are the emotes of different genders? What are the character customization options for the different genders?

Just because gender isn't generally flagged as something that makes an NPC respond differently to you outside of what pronoun they use* doesn't mean that there's no sexism in WoW.

*And it does affect things sometimes. For example, in the Uldum quest "Tipping the Balance," Harrison Jones will either say "I wouldn't want a pretty little thing like you getting hurt" or "We wouldn't want you getting hurt." I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out which gender gets which dialog. (Note, however, that an NPC can be sexist without the game itself being sexist. It's important not to mistake the voice of a character for the voice of the authors.)