One unequivocally positive outcome of the communists winning over the nationalists that even an ardent anti-communist like Jung Chang will attest to was their gender equality reforms. The first and most symbolic act was a serious crackdown on foot binding.
My point wasn't that reform hasn't happened, my point was objecting to the casual generalization of China as currently superior to the West in gender equality--by demonstrating the concrete sexism of the past.
Having ruled out the past since both West and China infringe gratuitously, what do we really _know_ about gender equality in China in the present day?
And I am the sort of person for whom a gender equality rating is strongly influenced by high ratings in tolerance for homosexuality and other non-gender-norm labels.
A third of China's millionaires are female. We know concrete facts like that. Guanxi rules business in China, so it would have been very easy to keep women entirely out of the higher echelons had the culture been predisposed to do so. That said, there is still, for example, plenty of low-level sexual harassment against women that wouldn't be tolerated in most of the West.
My point about foot-binding might have been off-topic, actually; I was trying to demonstrate that both cultures have, err, regrets about gender inequality in the past.
One has to be careful comparing these things on a linear scale. But yes, I agree. Beyond the context of our immediate discussion, the equality of men and women in China is noteworthy because it contradicts the still-commonplace orientalist conception that Asian women are submissive.
Now we're getting a bit off-topic, so I'm going to close with the idea that women in China could still be considered largely submissive if the ratio is a third instead of a half if one were to really press the viewpoint asking "In what ways could gender equality improve?" but that's a bit of devil's advocacy I'm ready to let fall silent. ;)