I wasn't really making too much of a statement on whether it's a good or bad thing and more just saying that communist nations did see a shift towards policies that could be described as removing gender and racial gaps. Meaning, not just stepping stones. If you're a communist dictator, you don't need stepping stones to get re-elected.
However, reduced gender roles are a good thing because it means women can become more self-sufficient, rather than depending on a man or the state to feed them and/or their children. It also means a greater number of people doing important work (e.g. science and engineering) that was previously relegated to only half of the population.
Ethnic identity in an ideal world would be non-existent. People wouldn't think about another person's ethnicity, people wouldn't need to think about their own. In the real world, of course, this is impossible. Evolution has made us to be racist, it's a basic part of group identity, keeping your group strong, holding competition away. However, to take away many of the pre-existing social barriers and turn a massive heterogeneous hodge-podge of a nation like China into one that doesn't care so much about all the differences between Han, Hmong, Zhang, etc ethicities is still a good thing.
If you don't then you just show that you're a person that feels a need to lie about his own background in order to argue by authority.