Medieval monks are famous for their work in copying and preserving ancient works for transmission. I don't ever recall, though, famous female monastics being involved in this context. Do we have any accounts of these women? Why was it rare (if actually it was so) for female members of religious orders to take part in these activities—anything beyond simple chauvinism?
Medieval nuns absolutely worked as scribes. They composed their own texts (or recorded the dictation of their sisters); copied texts for their own use; compiled, edited, and translated older texts for study; exchanged letters of support and advice with other communities; and sold books. In the second half of the 15th century, the sisters of San Jacobus Ripoli in Florence even earned permission to operate a printing press based on their skill and success as scribes in the marketplace!
It's true that women's houses tended, on average, to be poorer than men's and thus have less access to the material resources necessary for book production. Nevertheless, most of the chauvinism here is in the lack of research on monastic women scribes until very recently (despite intense work on monastic women original-authors). Medieval nuns wrote. A lot.
You might be interested in reading:
Alison Beach, Women As Scribes: Book Production and Monastic Reform in Twelfth-Century Bavaria
Cynthia Cyrus, The Scribes for Women's Convents in Late Medieval Germany
Beach's study focuses in-depth on one convent's manuscript survival, and Cyrus offers a sweeping overview of German-speaking convent book production based on some manuscript research but also thorough scrutiny of (modern) medieval library catalogs. I highly recommend both books.