English is not my first language, but if I understand correctly, "woman" is often a noun and "female" is often an adjective; but the usage can be interchanged.
The articles that you link say that using "female" as a noun is somewhat demeaning. OK, I can agree with that.
What I don't get is how using "female" as an adjective can be demeaning at all? This is a different question that seems very surprising as a non-native speaker. Using the noun "woman" as an adjective (in apposition) is maybe grammatically correct, but sounds very strange to me.
There are people who argue that all kinds of things are demeaning or offensive. For example, some have argued that "person with disabilities" should be preferred over "disabled person" because using the word "person" first emphasizes their humanity. I heard someone claim that saying "I'm going to go home and sleep to recharge my batteries" is demeaning (to yourself!) because you're talking about yourself like a machine.
As far as I know, these notions do not usually come from (a) studies showing e.g. that, if you have people read text using one phrase or the other, and then give them questions designed to evaluate their opinions of disabled people, you see an actual effect; or from (b) a statistically significant sample of actual disabled people saying they really would prefer one phrase over the other; but usually from (c) an academic thinking something up and writing about it, and other people reading about it and adopting the new phraseology so as to avoid the chance of being called "insensitive". Sometimes it makes it out of academia and we end up hearing about it.
The articles that you link say that using "female" as a noun is somewhat demeaning. OK, I can agree with that.
What I don't get is how using "female" as an adjective can be demeaning at all? This is a different question that seems very surprising as a non-native speaker. Using the noun "woman" as an adjective (in apposition) is maybe grammatically correct, but sounds very strange to me.