I think the most interesting thing to note here is think about the edits you’d make initially. You’d tweak genes related to growth to cause women to produce more growth hormones during development. This would give them the same height as men.
Ok, now, you’ve got new problems created. Human hearts scale badly - physically larger hearts seem to result in more premature deaths from heart failure. Right off the bat, this little tweak of yours would shorten the lifespan of these women a little bit. (since you would not have tampered with testosterone levels, these women wouldn’t be as likely to have blocked coronaries, probably, but larger hearts have other reliability problems)
Ok, the next problem I can think of is that human skin doesn’t handle prolonged mechanical loading all that well, especially the skin on women, and this is a major factor in determining relative beauty. These new women with bigger bodies would probably have more problems with cellulite (since they have more skin area on their thighs and therefore more loading) and breast sag and other significant cosmetic issues.
Ok, now you want to fill in some of this extra tissue with muscle so these women have the same strength. It’s a really bad idea to tamper with sex hormones if you want these women to stay women, so you’d need to instead tamper with the muscles themselves. I’ve read of several methods, but myostatin gene knockouts create some very dramatic images. You indicated a desire to make men and women equal, so you’d have to do something to tone it down a bit.
Your new problem is behavioral. One reason it is possible for men to victimize women is that women have instinctual behaviors that don’t always result in them fighting to the limits of their physical abilities (which are considerable, even if weaker than men on average). They may submit to an attack in order to protect their body from damage, when kidnapped there’s theories that they may even feel emotional attachments to their kidnapper. The Savannah hypothesis says that during the human evolutionary past, it was common for a tribe to kill all the men of another tribe and steal their women, and according to this hypothesis it makes sense for women to have evolutionary instincts to respond correctly in this scenario.
Tampering with human instincts is beyond the level of current human ability now or in the foreseeable future. This is because there are too many difficult to model elements between any actual genetic changes and the results in an adult human. Any codon changes you make become changes to the structure of a protein, which during development interacts in hideously complex ways with other proteins which in some way results in default neural pathways that in turn interact with other brain systems and eventually, years and years later, you end up with a human being who behaves a certain way but only in a statistical sense. Creating the desired behaviors would be more than just cut and paste - you would probably need the ability to design novel proteins used in the brain to stimulate the development of new neural circuitry that somehow results in your desired changes. This would probably require understanding and abilities closer to a god than anything resembling present day humanity.
I think a better move is to have everyone wear around body worn cameras, all of the time. Everything will be recorded, always. In a society with this kind of transparency, the light of truth will stop more abuse than any other measure.
That, and implanted weapon implants. I’ve always figured that the hot chicks of 2150 might appear defenseless but will actually pack entire arsenals of weaponry hidden in various places inside their bodies. A little bit more upper body strength is no match for integrated claws, taser implants, the ability to execrete tear gas…
