There's an interesting construction of gender roles in Midnight Robber. Nalo Hopkinson seems to be paying a certain amount of lip service to the idea that in the future envisioned, people will be able to choose their roles and occupations regardless of gender. She accomplishes this sometimes by reference to olden times in which roles were more stratified, as when the eshu tries to explain to a confused Tan-Tan how once, women weren't allowed to play the Midnight Robber. Tan-Tan's confusion reflects her complete expectation that what she will be able to do will be unrelated to her gender. Similarly, Hopkinson breaks stereotypes about women's ability to do hard manual labor with frequent reference to the physical strength of her female characters. Even Ione is described at least once in terms of her musculature, and the original runner is female.
At the same time, Antonio at least has very strong expectations of the roles that will be taken by the women around him. In Toussaint, he expects his affairs to go unremarked, but explodes over Ione's. In New Half-Way Tree, he retires from the fields, but cannot believe that Janisette would want him to take care of chickens, or a garden. Originally, it seemed possible that this stratification was limited to him, but the staff of the house in Toussaint, the cultured, and thus presumably more progressive, world, take for granted his dual-standard of sexual behavior.
An interesting thing about the move to New Half-Way Tree is that the rougher lifestyle and the need to physically work there seems to bring out the disparities in expectations for men and women. Men consistently seem to enforce law, instead of the feminized figure of Granny Nanny, and the word slut is used openly.
On that level, the douen and the hinte, who have openly, directly separated tasks for men and women based on their physical competencies, seem much more sophisticated. This is particularly true because they seem to have found a balance of power within their roles, rather than the humans, who live in a much more clearly male-dominated society. What male domination we see among the douen appears to be an artifact of Tan-Tan's perspective, having seen the packbirds so long as non-sentient.