Hence the subject of this thread.
Give her thirty credits and she’ll bite the head off a live chicken.
Hence the subject of this thread.[/quote]
Another option is to go for a metphorical beard. The female thinker may not have an actual beard but has to often hide herself behind the trappings of her mostly male colleagues in the fraternity of thinkers. As character traits have no specific description, I would allow this 
Wow, that almost sounded like I was bearded.
Or you could replace Bearded with the Grognard trait or the 36 oz Cup of Mountain Dew trait.
-L
The real question we should be asking here is why Luke hates women!
Or why Luke loves beards!
Gak!
In Runequest, there’s a cult who worships a god of knowledge where all the Runepriests are required to have beards. Female rune priests do indeed wear fake beards (Lankhor Mhy, I think it’s spelled).
That aside, consider this. Lots of women disguised themselves as men to get into male occupations or to avoid gender restrictions at various points in history. If you want to maintain the gender division, there’s no real reason a woman couldn’t disguise herself and take such a life path.
Likewise, a man taking ‘Lady’. As long as you weren’t required to, you know, have children or something else gender-specific. But even then…
With a High Index world, I would think there would be options available, medically, to make men into women, women into men, or give anybody who might want one a beard (or take it away if it’s unwanted). There would probably be a fairly big cultural impact from such a culture, but that doesn’t mean it can’t exist somewhere.
Also, I think the metaphorical approach works best. If you don’t want to give (or force) beards on women but you do want to allow gender equality in lifepaths, then ‘fix’ them. Make a slightly different lifepath with ‘Wizened’ or ‘Deeply lined face’, or ‘Impressive Countenance’ or even ‘Ritual Makeup’ or ‘Distinctive Tatooing’ or something.
Likewise, you could take a Lady lifepath and tweak it slightly to be the lifepath of a ‘career domestic noble’ in some fashion, removing the gender requirement.
Shrug.
I realize this thread is mostly in jest. I’m in a unique position to reflect on this particluar problem, as it happens – comes with the estrogen. 