TLDR; Men participate at a rate 7x that of women. In the TOP tournaments (the ones that yield enough points to compete for a top ranking), men participate at a rate of 21x - 35x. Given that, women who participate in top tournaments are only slightly underrepresented. Over all, women are almost EXACTLY represented in the top 10% of rankings.

Solarvalue has the right idea. I wouldn’t be surprised if statistics alone could answer this (to a great extent).

Given that there are about 30,392 players total, and about 2131 (2135 today) women. That’s almost exactly 7%. So, assuming a linear distribution, we would expect the following

Top 100 - Expect 7 - Actual 1 - Women 14% of Expected Value (Actual/Expected)

100 - 7 - 1 - 14%
200 - 14 - 3 - 21%
300 - 21 - 7 - 33%
400 - 28 - 9 - 32%
500 - 35 - 13 - 37%
1000 - 70 - 38 - 54%
2000 - 140 - 113 - 81%
3000 - 210 - 202 - 96%
4000 - 280 - 341 - 122%

So, women are underrepresented at the very top, all the way until we reach the top 3000. At 4000 , women represent 122%. So there are more women at the top of the rankings (if you define the top as 4000 out of the 30,000).

I looked at some of the recent results of big tournaments. I only considered Top 140 US men (excluding women), Top 20 US women. The idea is that these top player should attend the top tournaments in the same ratio as exists in IFPA.

48 men / 1 women (expected 7) - The Open - IFPA World Championship
40 men / 3 women (expected 6) - D82 Pinball Super Series Event 4: Group Match Play
38 men / 3 women (expected 5) - IFPA Pin-Masters
27 men / 0 women (expected 4) - IFPA North American Pinball Championship
21 men / 2 women (expected 3) - It Never Drains in Southern California Classics
18 men / 0 women (expected 3) - Cleveland Pinball and Arcade Show Main Tournament
192 men / 9 women - total over the 6 tournaments

These numbers indicate that women disproportionately do not attend the top point garnering tournaments. Not one of the above have the top women over represented. It turns out the women in these tournaments, Kassidy Milanowski, Keri Wing, Sunshine Bon, Louise Wagensonner, are the top 4 US women.

So we aren’t really comparing 7x men to women, it’s more like 21x (192/9) or as much as 35x (140/4). While 1/7 of those participating are women, only 1/35 - 1/21 of those participating in the top tournaments are women.

Given that we’d expect (assuming men = 35x women)
100 - 3 - 1 - 33%
200 - 6 - 3 - 50%
300 - 9 - 7 - 78%

It’s not that far off from the expected value. In each range, women are under represented by 2-3.