Barrier troops are troops that stand behind the front line to prevent desertion or retreat from frontline troops. While the execution of this military strategy has varied over time, barrier troops are typically comprised of more experienced and better equipped soldiers who are protected from initial enemy engagements and then come in later to finish them off. In a sense, soldiers in barrier troops are valued because of their military experience and training, and are therefore protected by front line troops.

The corollary to this is cannon fodder. While the term is not official used in any modern military (because it is demoralizing), cannon fodder refers to troops that are seen as disposable. These troops are usually made up of inexperienced soldiers who aren't as well equipped or trained, and occasionally aren't even given weapons to fight with. Their purpose is to wear down the enemy and use up enemy supplies (for example their supply of bullets) before more experienced troops arrive to finish things off.

While this practice is most famously employed by the Russian military (although arguably exaggerated by Western media), it actually goes back at least to the Romans, and is not restricted to any one county, battle, or war.

The key point about these initial frontline troops is that they do not have to be strong or capable to serve that role. Instead what we find is that it is more important for them to be at the bottom of society so that nobody will care when they get killed.

Militaries that employ this strategy often come from stratified societies and discriminate inside the military based on a person's social value.

Soldiers who come from prestigious families and have gone to military school get placed in barrier troops whereas conscripts from the country's poor and minority populations get used as cannon fodder.

Some of these soldiers are old and feeble, others are young and without families, and still others are ethnic minorities, slaves, prisoners, and occasionally prisoners of war (a practice now banned by the Geneva Convention).

It would follow then that if male conscription was caused by women being seen as weak and worthless, Russia and other nations would pad these units with women in addition to the old, young, and feeble.

Instead what we see are boys as young as 12 years old, and men as old as 60, who are clearly weaker and less capable than adult women in their 20s, being sent to war in their place.

This is because these men have a lower social standing than women, so their lives are not seen as important. The intersection of being poor, disenfranchised, minority, and male, is what puts them in these units. It is not a reflection of privilege or prestige to be conscripted. Which means if women really were valued less and seen as less capable than men, then they would be conscripted before men, and put into disposable units inside the military hierarchy. They would specifically be killed to save the lives of men instead of the other way around.

Even when you do find armies that employ women, they typically do not place them on the front lines. Which clearly indicates that female soldiers are valued more than their male counterparts, even when society deems it morally ok for them to serve.

(A small observation here is that the usage of child soldiers, but not female soldiers, implies that women are valued more than children, hence the phrase "women and children first" starting with "women", and not "children").

So let's drop this notion that women are excluded from conscription because they are seen as weak or less valuable. Because if that were the case, they would be conscripted into disposable units of the army along with ethnic minorities and literal children, whereas adult men would be conscripted into higher and more prestigious areas of the army, or left out completely.

Even if perceived weakness does play a part, a much larger and primary reason seems to come down to men being valued less than women. Which is a systemic phenomenon known as male disposability.

If we were honest and had any intellectual integrity about this at all, then we would admit that male disposability is a huge, primary factor on it's own that deserves to be discussed, and not some kind of side-effect of misogyny to be brushed aside.