Because culturally, one of the interesting things about this story was that the men and women were both treated more or less equally - both sexes had to wear veils, not just women, and the only indication of a difference between the way the sexes was treated was that construction workers seemed to be exclusively male, and I don't know if we should read anything into that but an unintended injection of our own world's gender differences.
Actually, I'm not sure that's necessarily the case. The one, solitary female we see seems to be treated much the same as her male counterpart, but we see so little of the women of this world that we simply can't make any generalisation about sexual equality.
True - let me clarify my statement. I didn't mean that the society as a whole was treating owmen as equal, because as you said, we don't really know about that. What is true is that in every aspect of life
where both men and women are mentioned in the story, there seems to be identical treatment:
- Both men and women wear robes and veils that conceal everything but their eyes. The only difference in the description of the two were the colors, and it wasn't clear if that is a matter of social perscription, or just fashion.
- Both men and women are disallowed from crossing into the other's areas.
- When on the way to the "marrying" pool, the narrator imagines that the women on the way there are in a parallel journy. In other words, he is not expecting them to be treated differently.
- As you mentioned, it didn't seem that there was a difference in treatment of men and women in the shared workspace, though we did have a small sample size.
- When the narrator was watching the children, he said he couldn't tell if they were girls or boys. This means that children of both sexes are allowed to participate in similar forms of play.
- The first passage quoted from the scripture specifically mentions both men and women being created in god's image.
It's also worth noting that the narrator never mentions anything negative said about women. This is important, since he was constantly thinking of other pieces of dogma that forbade heterosexual contact. If there was any scripture or teaching that said women were inferior, unclean, or anything like that, I would expect him to be actively thinking of it, whether or not he agreed with it.
Note that none of the above are in any way conclusive, but at least this shows a trend.