A couple of questions, if it's no trouble.
1. If you don't install the spcultures file, how rare are female soldiers, in your estimation?
2. Do these female troops appear in NPC armies?
3. Any idea if Sword sisters and such are still in the game?
They'll be rare, you'll only really be able to recruit already upgraded female troops, what the spculture file does (atleast to my understanding) makes the female basic troop the default one, so it's more common to find it after making the change.
They appear, but extremely rare, on my save, a garrison of 270 soldiers only had 1 female, I think this is because the garrison and armies use their own xml files to generate those armies, all you would need to do is add the female soldiers to those files to make NPC use them.
They should be, I did not remove them or modify them in any way.