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Notes -
I don't know if it's so much in modern fiction, but I've been reading a ton of Golden Age crime/detective fiction from the period roughly 1900-30s and boy howdy, the women in it are only there to be:
(1) Widowed elderly mother who is concerned about family scandal
(2) Striving society hostess spending her rich husband's money on throwing elaborate country house parties
(3) Young daughters of same husband-hunting and doing nothing else all day (I'll come back to this one)
(4) Young daughters of same going through a rebellious phase, which means being a flapper
(5) Scheming adventuresses whose entire point is to be the Femme Fatale whom the detective outwits
(6) Wholesome lasses the detective/hero may or may not consider a love interest/possible wife/help during the investigation who then doubles up as love interest
(7) Servants and persons of the lower classes who work in shops or tearooms, but they don't really count as women, they're just the background characters needed
Regarding (3), they literally do nothing all day. Some of this may be to do with the lack of education and career opportunities, but it's extremely noticeable when the son of the house is going to university or talking about his profession or business in regard to his life plans, and his sister is "oh I think I'll call on Dolly for tea tomorrow" as the equivalent.
It's really a lot better in modern fiction, though the "hot chick whom I wanna bang and indeed may do so on pages 16, 85, and 130 described in detail" is new (6) for a lot of books.
EDIT: This is why, when Dorothy Parker gave us Harriet Vane who did not immediately want to marry Lord Peter, it was rather novel. Though Agatha Christie was able to do the same with Miss Marple, and to be fair there were Victorian/Edwardian lady detectives as well. But the main female characters in books were either unmarried daughters waiting for a husband, or unmarried daughters/nieces doing the housekeeping for their father/uncle/brother. A male character who spent all his time in the same kind of idleness was a clear indicator that he was a Bad 'Un, but for women there was nothing else (if they were of a certain social class, and such novels were indeed all about ladies and not young persons).
Those sound like archetypes, in a genre where (to my understanding) everyone is an archteype. Are the male characters really so rich and multifaceted?
Well, they are described as "rough around the edges", and if they have edges they must have facets bounded by them.
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Oh sure tropes, but the contrast is really striking to me now: average male background character - has life; average female background character - is there to be pretty.
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