No one says “women soldiers” except maybe a civilian.

And I’m not telling you to, stop putting words in my mouth. Female as an adjective is fine, “female soldier” is fine, calling a group of human women “females”, as in a noun, is demeaning and incel lingo.

Female/male are used in English as adjectives when describing humans, but as nouns they only refer to animals. “She is a woman” and “She is a female actress” are both okay but calling women “females” is purposefully demeaning and sexist. I do not believe there is any regional difference in this, nor should we really care about such since there are no regions when we’re on a global forum.

I’m from a country with mandatory conscription for men, so yes, I’ve been in the military and I’ve seen the misogyny (among countless other varieties of bigotry) rampant in that system from front row seats. We had a handful of female volunteer conscripts, as well as one of my NCOs was a woman, and it was blatantly obvious they were not recieving the same treatment as the majority of us who were men (and not in a good way, if there was any room for confusion).

Experiences like that are among the key reasons I’m not happy to see people keep perpetuating that kind of behavior, especially in other traditionally male-centric contexts like the IT industry and even here on this forum.

I’d rather sound miserable than incel.

While true, there are some languages that are the wrong tool for every job. JS is one of them. I’ve dreamt of a future where web frontends switched to something sane but instead we got stuff like typescript which is like trying to erect steel beams in quicksand. For web frontends I can understand that historical reasons have lead to this but whoever came up with node thinking JS would be a great backend language has a lot of explaining to do.

“They said”

If only there was some generally agreed upon symbol to denote direct quotes as opposed to paraphrasing an idea in your own words. If only…

they preferred training females

It’s “women”.

Which is exactly why you shouldn’t be using them in a situation that clearly calls for a switch.