Well, I've never seen a woman taking such a stance. You need not to mimmic the man' stance just for the sake of consistence. The man is inbetween ready-to-action, whatever the action might be. Try and find a similar ready-to-action stance for a woman.
If that still doesn't work, how about 2/3 poses instead of one, so that your character turns "ready-for-tussle" if you equip hands with blades, "ready-for-sneaking" when you equip with camouflage cloth and graplings, and "ready-for-charismatic-shopping" once equipped with rings and silk ?
edit: the EGA card could have up to 64KB of video memory, and one screen is 320x200/2, slightly less than 32KB, so the trick is doable by having the two pictures in VRAM (w/ shadow and wo/ shadow) and hopping to the other half of the screen on vertical retrace. On CRT screens, that should work well and un-noticed.
as for the skin colour, you could also explore
the full colour palette (64 colours), and not simply stick to the CGA-backward-compatible tints.
I get a distressed feeling when a game world breaks my immersion and starts feeling enclosed, like a snowglobe.
I feel that after 5 minutes using a Windows operating system 0_0