Are female characters really penalized in Age of Conan?

There's an unpleasant rumor gathering strength in the Age of Conan community. It seems to have begun with YouGamers eight-page review, which (despite delivering a relatively healthy overall score of 76) is uncompromising in its criticism of those parts of the game that, in the reviewer's opinion, fall very short of what was advertised.

The bombshell comes on page 7, where the reviewer states outright that '... Age of Conan's weapon swing time depends on the duration of the visual swing animation, and female characters swing their weapons about 25% slower than males - so every female melee character does 25% less damage over time!'

Immediately, players demand to know whether this is true or not. Some report that it is; others report that they're not seeing anything at all different between their characters, and maybe it's down to class as much as gender. Although there's a lot of noise and not a lot of signal, the general consensus from the forums appears to be that female characters are indeed attacking more slowly, resulting in overall lower DPS.