Regarding Tolkien, it greatly moved me to read
that his service in the Great War
was the inspiration for the conflict between
the "good guys" with the Nazgul in cold-blooded soulless pursuit.

Seeing action in the service during such a war
would be largely a single-sex experience,
for all that women are present behind the scenes.

There are places in Tolkien that really are a grind to read,
and I don't think that's coincidence either;
war must be a crushing, grinding thing to endure
when it isn't scaring the expletive deleted out of you.

So I cut Tolkien some slack; he has his context and his history.

Tolkien's idea of balance in characters seems to have been
his multi-species cast,
with humans and elves, masculine and feminine,
balanced out by hobbits, dwarves, orcs, ents, sorcerers …