Information Is Beautiful

Isn’t there the “problem” with dwarves that you can’t tell if male of female without seeing them naked because women look alike and have also beards?

Yes, sexual dimorphism is low in dwarves but more importantly only 1/3 are born female. In his essay about the coherence of Tolkein’s racial categories, Paul Kocher argues that this fact is responsible for the dwarves’ main characteristics: incessant mining and tunneling sublimate frustrated sexual energy, and chronic hoarding and possessiveness manifest an underlying scarcity mentality. Yet female dwarves are SO conspicuously absent from the narratives, even from domestic scenes such as Turin Turumbar’s seizure of Mim’s home, that their absence is probably not due only to Tolkein’s backgrounding of female characters, but to some aspect of sexual segregation in dwarf culture.