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Can't provide any links, but some relative anecdotals...
Women as a group relative to men did have high literacy rates, high education levels under Saddam's regime, and were free of many of the traditional barriers found across the broad sweep of Arab society.
However, when you begin to factor in race and religious background into the equation, Saddam's support of equal opportunity goes out the Window. Sunni women had it the the best off among ethnic and religious groups of women, followed by Shia women with Kurdish women a distant third.
In our haste to find postmodern justification in things I think we often overlook some of the distinctions of importance, i.e. while certain groups of women were better off under Saddam's rule than they are now, there are other determinants besides gender that deserve consideration before making sweeping statements like "Iraqi women were better off under Saddam."
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