If you are just looking for fantasy that equalizes male and female practitioners of magic Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series levels the playing field. In fact, it is seriously tilted towards women for the first part of the series.

in the first part yes. unfortunatley in the second part all the men are just naturally more powerful and everytime a women is exposed to the male side of the onepower they freak out because oh it's so violent and hard to control, while the men have no problem dealing with the womens side.

not to mention that about half of the problems in the series are caused by women scheming and interferring because they're all thus so convinced that men are incompetent.

I remember being dumbfounded when I read an intervew with Jordan and the interviewer asked how he wrote such strong women. ... yeah if you assume strong women are all horrible humans sure I can see thinking he writes strong women.

You think they're horrible bc you see the world from rand/mat/perrin's eyes. If you were aes sedai & a bunch of ignorant kids with that much power popped up you'd do anything to control them. Brandon Sanderson said that as he gets older he finds himself thinking more like Moiraine. I feel the same way.

link: http://www.brandonsanderson.com/blog/599/WoT-Read-Through-EY... (running off to shadar logoth without telling anyone!)

Well I mostly agree with Brandon, and frankly even as I was writing my post I felt that Nynaeve and Moraine were the best of the bunch, Nynaeve particularly.

But the arguement of "but they ARE reckless ignorant kids" only works for the first couple books. 8 books in women are still running around saying Rand/Mat/Perrin is a wool headed moron who will only make things worse if left to his own devices, despite each having shown their competence time and time and time again, while the women's meddling caused things to go pear shaped just as often.

Rand still does insanely stupid things. At the end of ACoS he runs off alone to kill Sammael & nearly dies half a dozen times before Moridin(!) intervenes. That retinue of Aes Sedai was probably the best thing to happen to him. He nearly died numerous times without them in APoD. He would have died at the end of winter's heart if he tried that alone with Nynaeve like he originally planned. He'd never have left Far Madding.

The other two also do stupid stuff (well, Mat more than Perrin), but it's easy enough to argue they shouldn't be running around loose either, not this close to the end. They have no real protection.

As I wrote a comment above, I was trying to rack through my mind to come up with examples of strongly written females from Jordan. I decided to ignore the forsaken and royalty (as perhaps Graendal, Morgase and Tuon might count) - and I managed to come up with Aludra and Tylee Khirgan.

While the concept was good - in almost no place where the gender disparity was shown - does Jordan portray the women in a good light. (Perhaps only the Village Council / Womens Circle comparisons)