Most of the material I put out here is straight up Torah sources. I don't give my opinion too much. But I am going to do that now to try to explain what seems a contradiction. Why do the middle acharonim talk about men being on a higher level but contemporary gadolim talk about an equality? How can both be true. On top of that the Kabbalah says women come from a higher sefira, that of malchus.
So I'll be brief here because I'm typed out, I think maybe it's like this. What's higher in the pre-world is lower here. When a stone wall falls, the stones up top roll the farthest. Personally, I feel there's something spiritual about women and something unspiritual. So on the spiritual side you have the emunah peshuta, the compassion (much less in our era though), the morality in many areas, the refinement of personality, the absence of violence. On the not spiritual side you have gossip, materialism, and irrationality.
So I think one way of thinking of it is that the Maharal and other Acharonim are explaining this world where the higher became lower, so the male is on a higher plane. However, because of the higher source of the female, the spirituality will come out particularly in the material plane where the spiritual is also manifest as Chasidus notes. So physically in many ways the woman is more spiritual. She can make babies. She is more physically refined, elegant, where the male is something of an ape. I think this explains feminine beauty. There's something spiritual there. And this is one reason it needs to be covered! And this is why her emunah is an emunah peshuta. It's sort of amorphous, basic, hard to define. But with the higher human functions the male is more spiritual. He is more rational, which is a spirituality. He sins less with his mouth, speech being a higher function. This is why he has more mitzvos. His spirituality is more revealed so it can be expressed in mitzvos. Her spirituality is less defined, more general, basic so she lives on a more intuitive plane which doesn't translate as well to positive time-bound mitzvos. (I have noted before that positive time bound mitzvos are masculine - sitting outside in the succah, wearing the same leather straps every day, etc.)
So as each is spiritual in different ways, you can say both are equal. So the way the scholars speak depends on how you look at it. You can say he is higher. You can say she is sort of higher. You can say both are equal overall.
In this world, he needs to be in charge but with great respect for her intuitive spirituality that often reveals a higher spirituality and without which he could not function.
After Moshiach comes, when the sin of Chava is rectified, it could be that everything switches, and the female emerges. The Baal HaTanya talks about this. Feminism could be a sort of evil manifestation of that, just like all the technology is an evil manifestation of the Torah that was supposed to come into the world in modern times. R' Kessin talks about this on his lashon hara lectures, that lashon hara caused the divine spirituality to be redirected to the physical.
