Yeah, they take it to a whole other degree that the gender issues don't come into play so much.
Even the Empress. There might not have been any men for centuries, but no one seems to take Galgan's gender into consideration next to his ambitions, nor was there any mention of that with Turak. A man with his professed lack of ambition, who feared any action being interpreted as ambition, would have made a big thing about his sex removing him from consideration. And Tuon's brothers seem just as deep in the competition as her sisters.

IDK, part of the bit about being aristocrats was the skills that separated them from the commoners. The origins of the aristocratic distinction is that they had the time and resources to train at war, while the commoners had to throw everything into producing the necessary goods for survival. Even if nobles had lesser-birth companions as children, the practice of arms is one area where the line would be drawn. Granted, WoT is at the stage where those distinctions are becoming moot, and there is a rising middle class on the verge of breaking out, but that means there are also far more profitable and productive things to be putting boys to work at, and the martial practices are even less well-regarded. At an earlier stage of societal development, parents would have embraced any opportunity for a boy to train at arms, because it was a way into the elite. Now, when they can get rich, it isn't worth the trouble.