For the elves, there's even a hint in the Silmarillion that Fingolfin and Finarfin were only in the running to be king after Finwe abdicated in a huff because their elder sister preferred to hang out with the Vanyar and wasn't interested. And of course in HoME he stated explicitly that the elves didn't do gender-based role differentiation (except for actually bearing children). This is quite extraordinary especially for a person of his era and background, and a position that no human society has yet achieved. The Hobbits were actually pretty egalitarian gender-wise too. It infuriates me when US fanfics try to map their nasty retrograde social structures onto Middle-earth.

Also, in an unrelated point, I remember causing some offence to an English woman when she discovered in the course of the conversation she and my Cajun-Puerto Rican friend (at whose house we were having dinner) were equally 'white' to me. It didn't help when I explained that since neither of them was any kind of Asian, Pacific Islander, Middle-easterner, African or an Australian Aboriginal, they both had to be white, because there was nothing else left for them to be. I was young at the time.