Re: female equality?
Well first off, women can lead in Islam, its just that there is a lot of distortion in the scholarly work. It also depends on what your definition of "leadership" is.
Secondly, like I said, its done to villify the opposite side. No doubt about that. Minah-pa, anytime someone sees a weakness in you, they'll try to exploit it. So people see that there is this current struggle within muslims regarding misogyny issues, and they're playing it up.
Just like we muslims play it up when we see that western society is now being weakened by high divorce rates and the break down of the American family, and other such trends. We expand it and then accuse westerners of "trying to go too far with feminism", and other such accusations...if we viewed things objectively, of course the conclusion will be different.