I had a Brother MFC something that had page counts on the toner cartridges: they would only print so many pages before saying they were out of ink, regardless of how much ink was left. You could access a secret menu and reset the counts using a special button sequence, but it was a gigantic pain at the time.
You're misunderstanding a little here. The issue is not with using 'female', the issue is with using it as a noun. 'Female athlete' is fine. 'The female' is not.