This has been bothering me for more than ten years
So there’s that scene in The Two Towers where everyone’s holed up in Helm’s Deep and are super outnumbers and probably gonna die.
To bolster their forces, they decide to arm the old men (ok, fair enough) and … the young boys? Meanwhile all the women cower in the caves.
What.
Like excuse me, in what way is a nine year old peasant boy with no training, who can barely see over the battlements, and who can probably barely lift a sword … in what way is that small child a more suitable combatant than an angry peasant woman who’s been slinging haybales and taming horses and rolling big barrels of mead and lifting pigs under her arms for all thirty years of her life. At the very least she can see over the battlements and lift a weapon. Depending on her place in society she almost certainly knows how to hold a rake or a scythe or a hammer or lift logs. She knows how to butcher animals, and has likely done so many times with giant knives and gotten covered in gore and viscera. Give her a cleaver on a stick and say “have at it, ma’am.”
Nobody in Helm’s Deep should be giving a flying fuck about “gender roles” when there’s an army about to come in and slaughter them to the last child. They should be thinking strategically. And strategically, arming untrained children is a bad idea, and arming strong adults with a basic grasp of how to wield a big weapon is a good idea.