I'd rather improve equipment and training methods than have lower standards for women....
I'm not actually recommending adopting lower standards for women.
I'm pointing out why there are not many women attempting triple axels and quads in their programs now, and why raising the base value of those jumps will not give any incentive to most women to attempt: because they cannot rotate those jumps enough to avoid downgrades. It makes no difference to a skater who can rotate a maximum of 3.25 rotations in the air whether the base value for 4 rotations is 8 points or 80 points -- she's only going to get credit for a triple, along with negative GOE. Therefore, she's better off doing a triple.
Better equipment and better training may increase the number of girls who are capable of rotating 4 times from, let's say, less than 1% of all junior and senior ladies to maybe 5 or even 10%. And those few ladies would benefit from any increase in the base values and be more likely to take the risk. But the majority of even good jumpers are still going to max out well short of 4 rotations. Female triple axels may increase faster than female quads. And most likely a large percentage of those female triple axels and quads would be done by girls in their early teens, who would then end up scaling back on their jump rotations as their bodies mature.
I do think there are ways that women can push the limits on jumps that don't involve more rotations in the air than the average small athletic woman is capable of (not to mention taller and curvier women who already are more likely to struggle with even 3 rotations).
Some of those advances have already become much more common in the past decade: 3-3, 3-half loop-3, and 2A+3 combinations; more jumps in the second half of program; air position variations; difficult entries; difficult exits; etc. There's still plenty of room to add even more difficulty in those areas, some of which would automatically earn more points and others that might not and therefore would be less attractive.
Other ways of increasing jump difficulty (e.g., 3-3-3 combination) are currently legal and rewarded but are not yet common, perhaps because few skaters can actually count on executing them successfully enough to earn full value and positive GOE.
Other options are not adequately rewarded, if at all, so no one is trying them. If rules were change to build in extra points, then we'd see more skaters attempting them. For example: jump combos or sequences using jumps rotated in both directions; jump combos with triples at the end following any doubles, or a single axel; jump sequences with controlled edge changes and/or turns on the ice between jumps (excluding double threes) without putting the other foot down in between, etc.
Some of those options are available to all skaters to increase their difficulty, whatever their current jump content.
Others are really difficult and would only benefit skaters who excel at the particular skills required. E.g., skaters who have the potential to rotate doubles in both directions would be a minority, and those who have potential to rotate triples both directions might be even rarer than those who have potential to rotate quads.
However quads are already right there in the scale of values with guaranteed reward to anyone who can pull it off.
Because a higher percentage of male bodies have the potential to rotate quads, we'll undoubtedly continue to see more male than female quads even if technological and training advances increase the number of female quads from none to some.
Other areas of pushing jump difficulty might be less dependent on body type, or might even favor more typical female body types, in which case we might see women leading some other directions of envelope pushing ahead of the men.
In fact, this is where the quote on my profile came from.
