Those “significant discussions about male/female gender roles” were almost always taken from white/European and Abrahamic perspectives, however, in the '90s.

“Gender” (as opposed to sex, which is to say the social construct rather than the biological—which is itself not as clear as people like to believe!) roles are a human universal. Every society that has ever walked the Earth, to my knowledge, has fairly clearly-defined gender roles (albeit with some societies having ‘third genders’ and others with gender role-switching, like some native groups in North America having sexual females choosing to be treated as male genders). What is not universal, however, is the specifics of what those roles are.

Who controls the money? In traditional patriarchal Abrahamic-influenced areas it’s “obviously” the men. (Except in the cases where it isn’t, but let’s not get too complicated, OK?) In the ancient Norse it was “obviously” the women. Who’s the head of the household? Again in the patriarchal Abrahamic environments it’s “obviously” the men. And again in ancient Norse society it was the women: they were literally the bosses of the homesteads. There were very obvious gender role differences in ancient Norse society … but equally obviously the differences were split along different lines.

And then let’s talk China. From the outside perspective it’s “obvious” that men are the bosses and women are subservient. You can see it in the public behaviour and even in the works of art. (We’ll come back to that art thing later, mind.) The key word you’re likely missing, however, because it seems unimportant, is “public”. Publicly women defer to men. But … who controls the money? In most Chinese cultures (yes, plural, there’s over 50 of them!) women do. (In some Chinese cultures it’s the women who decide marriages, divorces, etc.!) And in any of the Chinese cultures, woe betide the man who publicly humiliates his wife. Or who takes a decision that impacts the household without consulting with his wife. You do it? You. Are. Fucked. (And not in the good way!)

Even in the art works you can see evidence of this. In The Peach Blossom Fan Li Xiangjun, a courtesan, has the power to turn down a marriage proposal from a politically powerful man in favour of a lesser scholar. This leads directly and indirectly both to the fall of the Ming Dynasty (!). In The Palace of Eternal Life the emperor’s consort Yang Guifei has so much power over the emperor that his preoccupation with pleasing her led to the fall of his reign. In The Fragrant Companion (an openly sapphic play in the 17th century!), the scholar Fan Jiefu’s wife, Cui Jianyun, sees the daughter of Lord Cao’s daughter, Cao Yuhua, and carries on a secret affair with her before, after many hijinks, managing to arrange her lover becoming her husband’s second wife so they could be together openly. (And her husband has no objection to being, in effect, cuckolded by another woman.) So even in the public-facing entertainments of China you see little glimpses of how gender roles aren’t quite cleaved along the same lines as western/Abrahamic ones.

No matter where you go in the world you will find strong gender roles (with, in some cases, noticeable fluidity, but not flat-out ‘makes no difference’ levels of it). This appears to be one of those very rare human universals. The specifics of the expression of those roles, however, varies wildly and in often-surprising ways.