I think that part of the issue is that people are sometimes mistaking a comparative claim for an absolute claim. Researchers claiming that hunter-gatherer societies had better gender relations than early agricultural ones aren’t thereby claiming that hunter-gatherer societies are anywhere near equal—just less unequal than the agricultural societies that followed them.
Searching a bit (using “origin of patriarchy” as the search term) I found two relevant books that seem to be the sources of a lot of claims: The Creation of Patriarchy, by Gerda Lerner, from 1986; The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe, by Marija Gimbutaš, 1991. These seem to both often be described as stating that there was once an equal society, and a later society imposed patriarchy on it some time around 5000 years ago. But the former seems to be more specifically claiming that early Mesopotamian civilization was less unequal than later Mesopotamian civilization, and the latter seems to be more specifically claiming that the Neolithic agricultural inhabitants of Europe had a matrilocal goddess-oriented society that was disrupted by the patrilocal god-oriented nomadic society of the Indo-Europeans that gave rise to the later societies. Neither one of them particularly supports the claim that hunter-gatherer societies are egalitarian and agricultural societies are patriarchal (the latter even seems to reverse this!) But both do give some evidence for the claim that might be more plausible, that there was a period shortly before recorded history in which gender relations were not as bad as they became by the early period of recorded history.
If true, this would be one more way in which one might expect pre-agricultural life to have been substantially worse than the present, but also better than much of agricultural history.
I think that part of the issue is that people are sometimes mistaking a comparative claim for an absolute claim. Researchers claiming that hunter-gatherer societies had better gender relations than early agricultural ones aren’t thereby claiming that hunter-gatherer societies are anywhere near equal—just less unequal than the agricultural societies that followed them.
Searching a bit (using “origin of patriarchy” as the search term) I found two relevant books that seem to be the sources of a lot of claims: The Creation of Patriarchy, by Gerda Lerner, from 1986; The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe, by Marija Gimbutaš, 1991. These seem to both often be described as stating that there was once an equal society, and a later society imposed patriarchy on it some time around 5000 years ago. But the former seems to be more specifically claiming that early Mesopotamian civilization was less unequal than later Mesopotamian civilization, and the latter seems to be more specifically claiming that the Neolithic agricultural inhabitants of Europe had a matrilocal goddess-oriented society that was disrupted by the patrilocal god-oriented nomadic society of the Indo-Europeans that gave rise to the later societies. Neither one of them particularly supports the claim that hunter-gatherer societies are egalitarian and agricultural societies are patriarchal (the latter even seems to reverse this!) But both do give some evidence for the claim that might be more plausible, that there was a period shortly before recorded history in which gender relations were not as bad as they became by the early period of recorded history.
If true, this would be one more way in which one might expect pre-agricultural life to have been substantially worse than the present, but also better than much of agricultural history.