The Wheel of Time, or WoT for short, is a great book series. Although its characters seem stereotypical, they do have some variability in them once the series gets kicking. The plot is, at least in its genre's scale, extremely complicated, or at least complicated enough to spawn at least dozens of active chatboards debating over theories.
Robert Jordan's (RJ for short) writing style is characterized by habit of writing long descriptions of irrelevant things, such as objects found in street, houses, people, in the middle of sentence. His stories also repeat some stereotypes about men and women all the time. Almost all women (maybe excluding Min) suffer from Feminine Nasal Syndrome.
As a comparison between WoT and other fantasy:
WoT's gender stereotypes remind me of David Eddings' books, but WoT has plot too, unlike Eddings' stuff. And more character to characters, IMO.
WoT began as adventure fantasy, being a pretty much of The Lord of the Rings -ripoff, but it has evolved into political fantasy, which has alienated fans of traditional fantasy, generating loads of flame in the lines of 'he should have quit after first 3 books'. On the other hand, the books after the 3 are those that have given WoT its reputation of complex plot with many seemingly meaningless sidenotes being quite meaningful.
People called Aiel have had a quite significant role in WoT in books after the first three, and they resemble quite a bit Fremen, according to some.
See also:
By the way, unlike you might think from below writeups, not everyone considers the seemingly unending WoT a bad thing. Call me a milk cow if you want, but I have actually enjoyed all the books, and my main gripe is that the later books are just too short. Figures.
Women in The Wheel of Time:
Just like review quoted on back cover of The Wheel of Time, about The Wheel of Time (linking twice is always so amusing) said, women have stronger role in WoT than, for example, in The Lord of the Rings. Robert Jordan has been quoted to say, "All male characters in WoT are based on sides of my personality, and female characters on my wife's personalities." This can be believed to some extent, for if the women have differences and there are more than one basic types, all share some common things, which RJ presents as if they were part of some international women's language (see Feminine Nasal Disorder). RJ has been called stereotypical for this, but many also find this amusing and it is the part of why I, for one, enjoy WoT.
List of more or less significant women characters in WoT: