And for every woman you can name there are easily several more men. It has nothing to do with taking away from those women, in fact that they managed to rise to prominence despite the disadvantages they faced in part marks them out. But to pretend there was somehow this unseen or unacknowledged 50/50 split is ridiculous. Are we all to pretend that Caesar conquered Gaul with Rome's great, and conveniently forgotten, female legions while we're at it?
True. But Caesar also did not have any conveniently forgotten legions of mages. Magic in Thedas is hugely powerful, and is dependent upon some kind of inherent sensitivity to the fade that has nothing to go with gender or physical strength. A single mage is worth many soldiers on the battlefield, so magic gives women an opportunity to stand with men on the battlefield and to demonstrate they can be both soldiers and leaders. It undoubtedly also provides plenty of other opportunities for being useful. That alone is a significant difference between Thedas and the opportunities available to women real medieval world. And experience shows that once women have demonstrated leadership in one area, it is easier to accept them as leaders in others.
Magic, or at least alchemy, also provides healing in Thedas. The high death rate, particularly amongst children, in medieval societies meant that most women had to spend most of their lives pregnant just to ensure that they had enough offspring to ensure someone outlived them. Then they had to care for said truckload of children, usually without help from grandparents or other relatives (lifespans being rather limited). Simply as a practical matter, that precluded married women from most other opportunities outside of the house ( although historical records do show that many women run in past generations run successful businesses from their homes - and looking slightly further back, Roman women in particular were very successful in business).
Moreover, the religion of Thedas is based upon a female prophet - this makes it very, very different to Christianity and Islam and Buddhism and just about every other religion in the modern world, all of which were developed by male prophets, many of whom seem to have had real problems with women (who they may not have had all that much to do with, given the segregation problem I'll get to shortly). Women have a powerful and significant place in the Andrastian faith, which appears to be the only unifying force in Thedas (much like Christianity in the early middle ages). Again, this provides an opportunity for women to demonstrate they can be leaders and dispel any misogynistic assumption that they can't. It also allows women an opportunity to shape society, and its laws and culture that they did not have in judeo-Christian culture and ecclesiastic law.
Plus, Thedas clearly has birth control of some description. The male obsession with controlling women was, in past generations, inextricably tied to the desire to control female fertility, which in turn bred an obsession with virginity and resulted in segregating women and keeping them as 'innocent' (or ignorant) as possible. Birth control obviously doesn't completely eliminate the male fear of raising children that are not genetically his, but it does mean that attitudes to sex change such that casual relationships become more acceptable. With mixing and familiarity comes friendship and empathy and acceptance of one another - something that is much harder when men and women are kept as separate as possible to minimise the risk of infidelity
Similarly, while Dragon Age does not delve into the issue, it seems likely that attitudes to sexual assault are probably quite different in Thedas than in the real medieval world. For most women in the medieval world, the threat of sexual assault was a very effective means of male control. The emphasis of chastity meant that for middle and upper class women, their virginity was their most valuable possession - thus the language of 'giving' and 'taking' it. With marriage a woman's main career choice, any form of extra martial sexual activity (or even a rumor of it) could result in her economic devastation. Then there was the threat of disease and pregnancy. Plus to top it all off, a woman who was the victim of sexual assault was often without any remedy at all - for most of the medieval period, rape was not a crime against a women, but against her husband or father, she was not allowed to prosecute the offence in her own name (meaning widows and spinsters had no avenues or address), and if the matter did somehow come before an (all male) Court, her uncorroborated word was worth less than that of her alleged rapist (the latter remained the law in most common law jurisdictions until the 1990s). Thus, the onus was on women to ensure that they were never in a position were they could be sexually assaulted, with the consequence that they had to be very cautious about what they did. This is one reason why changing attitudes to sexual harassment and assault are such a pillar of feminism.
I could go on and on about the differences ... they are endless, and I don't even need to touch elves and dwarves and demons.
In any case, it's certainly true that past eras on this world have generally sucked for women. But to be completely fair, they have also sucked for most other people as well. Societies have tended to be dominated by a small group of elite men, whose power, prestige and wealth came from their parents or their connections. And even their lives could suck if they developed so much as a tooth abscess, a kidney stone, or a friendship with the wrong faction at Court. Viewed in a greater historical context, the chances of Cassandra, a woman, rising to the head of a templar style order in the real world was really not that much less likely than Cullen, the commoner boy from a village in Nowheresville, doing it. Yet that doesn't stop us having games filed with peasant heroes and noble, elderly kings. That's one reason why we call it fantasy!
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