The male-in-the-face issue is probably a combination of the hair and facial features. The hair, when you're just looking at the face, looks like a boy's haircut: short, and on the side it doesn't go past the ear. You're going with a difficult style since it's not something that translates well into pixels unless you show that the hair on the side isn't just short hair falling downward and instead hair that's being pulled up. You can always try to hide some of it by having bangs or other hair in front of it or adding things like hair clips to show that you're doing something with the hair. Like so:
These sprites show less prominent noses. In general only the overly masculine sprites have larger noses. You could also try changing the shape of the jawline and see if you can't make something that you like better.
