Armor designs for females?

[Floret]

It's the pattern that gets me. It's not that one woman in one picture is incongruously clad compared to her male comrades... it's that all three of them are, one on each cover.

To be fair, I did select a bit. Mostly for pictures with women and men on them, though - after going through stuff for the second edition, maybe some more (With quite some scantily clad men, now.):
1; 2; 3; 4; 5; 6; 7; 8; 9; 10; 11

And sure, some of that is okay. And DnD might have been doing alright as well. But most of that... really isn't, and DnD wasn't alone on the market for long. So from my experiences - yeah, portraials of female armor/Adventuring clothing have improved greatly over the years, even in RPGs, where there WAS a certain "need" for improvement. To act as if there were only bad examples is dishonest, sure, but to act as if there wasn't (or isn't still) a certain problem is as well.
...Unless, of course, one doesn't consider non-equal representation of men and women to be a problem. But I do.

They're trying. They've tried to depict a female character in what's supposed to be functional armor.

It has some issues... scale-mail acting like cloth and hugging her form, with a tank-top cut leaving upper chest, neck, shoulders, and underarms all unprotected... but at least she's wearing what attempts to be full torso armor. I'd like to see some indication that she has a helm even if she hasn't had a chance to put it on, but I'm willing to overlook that since it's just the character and not a full scene.

Pretty close to my take. I just really love the character and the fact that this is amongst the iconics now - a woman defined mostly by her muscles and strength, not her prettyness.
(Depicting especially iconic characters in helmets is not the strong suit of the illustrations, sadly; at least not better than in most media. So, no, she never wears one.)

For better depictions of armor:
Maybe this? My second favourite picture of an armored woman from the current edition - the favourite isn't findable by google, sadly

Or, one of my favourite signs of "Hey, something is changing":
Rondra, the goddess of Honor, War and Storms... One time from 4th Edition, one time from 5th.
...Dark Eye picdump over. (For now?)