The "colorblind" approach doesn't really work. it only serves to maintain social hierarchies by ignoring that there's a problem in the first place.
By basically not having the laws which are there to promote solving the problem, it effectively ignores that there's a problem at all. Being officially legally the same doesn't mean society treats you the same, and at that point you're trusting the population to just dissolve the hierarchies themselves with the law disallowing the methods which are actually effective at doing that which... doesn't work.
Plus there's a ton of ways to discriminate in law without mentioning gender, and having plausible deniability about it. That's what a ton of the Jim Crow era in the US was about. That's what much existing legislation does with women actually.