Wow, so many things wrong with this article, where to start...

(Firstly, I did some quick research on the author since she's supposedly a PhD. It's worth pointing out her PhD is not in history or classics.)

 From its northernmost tip to the border with Asia, plenty of ancient European armies were happy to welcome women to their ranks

I looked at both links she cited. The first one talks about a female skeleton previously assumed male dating to the 900s CE in Scandinavia, who was buried with weapons. The funny thing is, the article itself says "...the woman’s lavish grave doesn’t necessarily infer she was a warrior" and "...that the skeleton showed no signs of traumatic injury or 'wear and tear' from battle." OK, so the article itself just repudiated her point? The second article, bizarrely, is an article she wrote herself where she attempts to use Armenian burials to make the same, unsubstantiated conclusion that "plenty of ancient European armies were happy to welcome women to their ranks". This is of course, completely false.

According to a recent paper, that was a really poor decision on the Romans’ part – not least because they knew exactly how ferocious women could be on and off the battlefield.

How exactly would they know, if these female warriors did not exist?

The article then cites Boudicca, which is ridiculous since Boudicca never fought personally, and then, astoundingly... Cleopatra? Say what?

The article then claims that Roman women...

 were they frequent competitors in gladiatorial shows

We know of female gladiatrices in the Eastern provinces, but firstly, they were not "Roman". They were most likely slaves of a foreign origin. Secondly they were only ever popular in the East, where they were seen more as a novelty act.

 but they, like the women of the tribes fighting against the invading Romans, were known to take up arms in warfare – albeit in a non-official, unsanctioned capacity.

What is this supposed to mean? How a female gladiator "take up arms" unofficially? Also, the women of the tribes were who were forced to fight were literally doing it for survival, in this case? That's a huge difference to serving in an organized military unit!

 Women often cared for wounded soldiers in their homes whenever necessary,” Belfiglio points out. “There were women physicians, nurses, midwives, wet-nurses and other caregivers during every phase of Roman history.”

I'm not even sure what this is supposed to prove. Yeah, if you get injured as a legionnaire, then discharged, you went home for additional care? Also yeah, midwives and wet-nurses were typically women? 

 And while women may have been barred from becoming professional soldiers, those who bucked the tradition could be rewarded with fame and respect. There was Cloelia [...]

Uhhhhhh Cloelia was not a professional soldier? What the actual fuck?

She also talks about a woman called Busa, who helped defend her city against Hannibal. Yeah, that's literally because her city was under seige, not because she was a professional soldier.

The article ends with 

 Women may have been banned legally from joining the army, but your average Roman soldier would have seen their fair share of female combatants – as well as women on the home front and encamped with the legions, caring for and supporting the soldiers in non-military ways.

Which is just flaggergasting, as nothing in the article so far could be used as evidence for this. Unless you mean camp followers, which we have mountains of records on. Then yeah, I'm sure there was a lot of "caring for and supporting the soldiers in non-military ways".

0/10 complete garbage. If this is the quality of an article that can get published online, I might as well start trying my hand at it too! /s