I’m not a native English speaker, so forgive my ignorance, but isn’t “women” a noun, not an adjective? Why not just say “female artists” or “female writers”?
As a side note, I’ve also literally never seen anyone say “men artists” or “men writers”. What gives?
Eh, I don’t think “female” is exclusively used to refer to sex. Language is subjective, so there is no objective definition of words that are used to describe something as complex as gender or sex.
Per Cambridge dictionary:
Female has meanings that mean “female sex”, woman doesn’t.
Language influences and even if theoretically, female can mean woman, it still adds an implicit link to sex.
As you said, language is subjective, so even if a dictionary says that female can refer to women, in practice as someone else pointed out, you can talk about a female dog, you can’t talk about a woman dog.