I am currently rereading the Aeneid, and there is a strange scene in it (I believe Book 1) where Venus appears in human guise, but she looks like an Amazon woman. Now, Venus would, of course, be the epitome of beauty, but would her engagement in traditionally "masculine" work, such as hunting, be viewed as attractive or unattractive to Romans.
To ask it more simply, did the Roman value a masculine woman as being attractive or of greater worth than a feminine woman, or would she be viewed as stepping outside of her role in society and thus undesirable?
There's a great passage in Cassius Dio where he talks about Queen Boudicca. He talks about her leading an army in a way that suggests her masculinity almost makes up for the fact that she's necessarily inferior to a man, and then suggests that she's more manly than Emperor Nero. But he's really treating her more like a curiosity than a real leader; she helps him criticize Nero's faults, but doesn't really get to speak with her own voice. In the end, as a woman, she could never really make it in the man's world of politics.
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cassius_Dio/62*.html (scroll down to LXII.2 and read through 12)
Which is to say, sexism ran deep in the Roman empire (to judge them with modern social values).