I agree that overall the girls on the show seem to exist principally as emperilled damsels or tragedy tokens, though Reiko Tamura had some good scenes.
I'd not put it down to age so much though; 1988 not exactly being the stone age.
Rather an author will simply set out to tell a story first and foremost with the characters that come to mind.
Paucity of good female roles? Yeah.
Not a dealbreaker by any means though I think.
Well, actually, there are a few cool and admirable female characters. Mitsuyo, Nobuko, and Tamiya (though whether or not she counts is up to interpretation) stand out in particular. Hell, I even found the minorest of minor female characters interesting; the scientist that was working with Hirama was a cool, collected professional even as Uragami was jacking it during the study, and it was a "female" parasite that deduced the nature of the scanning device.
Nobuko putting herself in the way of boiling hot oil to protect her son was badass, and she gets treated better plot-wise than Shinichi's father, who's barely present compared to her even though he survives-at least she mattered. On top of that, she was a lot more perceptive and could tell that something was going on with Shinichi, and the pair of them together were a breath of fresh air when it comes to parents in anime. Mitsuyo was loads of fun to watch; she stole the show the whole time she was on screen and managed to talk Shinichi out of a nigh-suicidal mindset. I don't think I need to go over how cool, interesting and compelling Tamiya was.
The high school girls are probably more the ones you had your problems with, but considering how the other high school boys were handled (pretty much the only thing the other boys did was pick fights), it's easy to believe it's just the author writing realistic characters-teenagers can be useless dumbasses sometimes, and girls are no more exempt from that than boys are. Hell, Shinichi himself was a total spaz for the first three or four episodes.
In addition to all of this, look at how quite a few of the male characters are treated. The only batshit-crazy and downright psychotic non-parasitc people we see are dudes (namely Hirokawa and Uragami), the majority of the expendably parasite-infested monsters-of-the-episode are male, and we have the high school boys I mentioned before. With all of this in mind, it seems to me that both femininity and masculinity got treated fairly in terms of character and complaints about how the women are treated look more like nit-picking and cherry-picking than noting any actual flaws with the work.
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Not bad for the most part. But the age shows
Parasyte is a perfect example of a manga that was developed in old times. However, it does its job establishing the setting. To have parasytes roaming about in the world fits in almost flawlessly, and the main character goes through Character Development pretty quickly, so it comes across feeling pretty fresh. Migi makes for a fun character as well; making for a fun duo to watch between the two leads, and you'll want to see them make it through this.
If there's one complaint that I have for this series, it's regarding most of the characters outside the leads. Particularly, the women, which feel more like plot-devices rather than genuine characters.
-Murano comes off very one-note and annoying, channeling what seems to be this story's version of Orihime from Bleach where she only ever has one thing to say over and over.
-Kana isn't much better. And comes off more as a satellite romance where she exists only to try to get with our main lead. She hardly has a character outside going gaga whenever he's around that not even her special ability to sense parasytes goes anywhere.
-Did I mention that there is a minor school-girl who had an idiot moment that got people at her school killed to a parasyte? No doubt you will be raging at how stupid this girl was acting here.
Considering how old the original manga of this series is, it's not surprising that the women aren't as well established given how small their role IRL was back hen.