When the series was first released, Mass Effect's alien species were overwhelmingly male with the exception of humans and the asari. In most of the original trilogy there was little to no chance of encountering female turians, krogan, or salarians. Even the less prominent races like the elcor and volus were entirely male. Mass Effect 3 and Andromeda both took steps to change this, adding female characters of different races to the franchise and bringing the gender balance much closer to even. However, it's worth asking why the problem arose in the first place.
Outside of the asari, which are a mono-gendered and feminine-appearing species, male characters are above and beyond more commonly encountered in the Mass Effect trilogy. This applied to both the Council races and even the least represented species on Mass Effect's Citadel. Despite this, turians and other alien characters would regularly mention wives or sisters while no in-game explanation was provided for their lack of physical presence. It created a jarring experience in which many fans felt disconnected from the world they were seeing and what was being explained to them in the lore.
Fortunately, the gender balance is overwhelmingly improved overall in Mass Effect: Andromeda when it comes to both returning species and newly introduced aliens. The angara are equally split between male and female characters, and female turians are significantly more common compared to the all-male makeup of the species in the first three Mass Effect games. Future DLC for Andromeda was abandoned due to the game's critical reception, however, meaning that races like the volus didn't appear. It's unknown if female members of these species would have been added to Andromeda or not, but the question could be answered in Mass Effect 4.
There are at least in-universe explanations for some of the cases of Mass Effect's lack of female aliens. Because of the krogan genophage, female krogan rarely leave their homeworld and live in isolated clans, focusing primarily on breeding efforts to keep the krogan population from declining too quickly. Among salarians, only fertilized eggs produce females, and similar to the krogan they often remain cloistered on their homeworlds out of both tradition and respect. Mass Effect 3 introduces players to notable exceptions to the rules through Eve, one of the few remaining fertile krogan, and the salarian Dalatrass, a political leader of the species. Mass Effect: Andromeda then went on to make female krogan far more common, likely because of attempts to expand the krogan foothold in the Andromeda galaxy.
The answer isn't as straightforward with other species, though. There's no explanation given in Mass Effect's lore to explain why no female turians appear before Nyreen Kandros' introduction in ME3's Omega DLC. While Andromeda helped resolve this too, even going so far as to add a female turian, Vetra Nyx, as a crewmate and romance option, it's unclear why the turian race was overwhelmingly male in the original trilogy. One explanation could be that the series' budget didn't have room for new character models. Turians are among the alien races that appear more drastically different than humans, especially compared to the asari or quarians. Creating different gender variants could have required time or money that BioWare couldn't spare at the time. Given that no official word has been given on the subject, Mass Effect fans can only speculate.
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