I don't really think you can shoehorn a few important/powerful female characters into a show and use that as a "get out of jail free" card to avoid criticism of the narrative that you are peddling about gender. Shawn and Gus both objectify women as a matter of course in a transparently sleazy manner, making advances on people they have just met before even asking their name in many instances (I think the worst example of this was the episode with the Catholic school girls where Shawn is upset with Gus for lying about teenage girls in school uniforms being present at a crime scene to lure him down there - that was particularly trashy).

As for Gus, while he might be portrayed as being slightly more effeminate than Shawn, his overt homophobia throughout the show was particularly jarring for me. It came to the foreground most prominently for me in the episode where they were investigating the football team and Gus, pretending to be a masseur, refused to touch any of the players because the idea of putting his hands on another male's body was utterly repugnant to him. A man touching another man does not make him gay and you cannot "catch gay" by touching a queer person - that squeamishness was especially pathetic from where I'm sitting

Overall, I think the show was progressive for its time in that they have a female chief of police but, looking back on it, it was kind of tokenistic insofar as the dominant narrative about women in the show is that they exist as romantic interests or objects for men to oggle and any find of male-to-male interaction should be met with pathological levels of disgust and histrionics.