I don't know about that. Perhaps "by the standards of the time" he wasn't, but Watson explicitly describes him as being more misogynistic than was the norm in "A Scandal in Bohemia" and "The Dying Detective", and in The Sign of Four, his opinion of Holmes's "ribbing" is to tell the reader that he was in too much of a hurry to stop and argue with such an "atrocious sentiment." So Holmes was considered sexist at least by Watson's standards. (Which admittedly might have been somewhat more progressive than the norm -- given Watson's other opinions concerning divorce, race, drugs, colonial warfare, American Politics, etc, it would be pretty IC for him -- but he still wasn't exactly some kind of radical.)

However yes, Holmes was never actually nasty with women. He never dismissed or devalued his female clients either, except that one time at the end of A Case of Identity.