I like designing a Sim and making them go from a nobody to owning the entire town. There's all kinds of community created challenges you can play if you want to make the experience harder. It's trivially easy to avoid losing the game but you can also set goals that demand a decent amount of skill. You have to min-max things RPG style for some of the harder challenges.

What makes it appealing to women is designing the houses and the Sims themselves. Also all the relationship drama that you can create in the game if you wish. Interestingly enough one of the biggest criticisms of 4 (besides the tranny shit they added to virtue signal) is that while the house building and Sim building features were a huge improvement there's nothing to do with the Sims you create. So people spend all their time building Sims and houses then never playing with them. I'm willing to bet the male/female ratio for 4 is way lower than it is for 3 for that reason.