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That's a lot of speculative theories and subjective experience that may really just be yours (maybe about 1/3 of research papers I have built on had women first authors, and I'm in a hard theory corner of CS). Either way, the picture you paint of the impact of women in the workplace seems nothing short of apocalyptic, so wouldn't you expect at least some examples of societies that don't allow it outperforming those that do? Instead, on top of the steamrolling dominance of egalitarian Western society, we are now seeing the ascendancy/imminent superiority of China which at least anecdotally places even more women in competitive tail jobs.
I would argue that the curve is slow, but parallel Muslim societies are beginning to outcompete Western societies.
At what? Turkey and Iran are technologically and militarily less dysfunctional than the Arab Muslim states, but that ain't saying much.
Sorry, I had a more detailed response and lost it, but I hope this suffices to give you the point of view I use to think about these things.
He who builds the biggest bridges and the fanciest paved roads is not necessarily going to be the last man standing. There are other very successful strategies for overcoming your neighbor.
The Vandals and the Goths out-competed the Romans. The Seljuk Turks outcompeted the Caliph in Baghdad. The Mongols outcompeted the Chinese, the Persians, the Turks, and the Eastern European principalities.
Those are the obvious military accomplishments, where a significantly less advanced and technological state has the vigor to punch way above its weight class when fighting against more, allegedly, militarily capable states.
There are also other strategies. One might say that the Goths, either wittingly or unwittingly, pursued a strategy of educating their sons in the advanced society of their day, while retaining their essential Goth-ness (by going to clubs), and eventually completing the long destruction of Western Roman society even while they adopted on the surface some of its formalities. What matters here is that the Goths were the last culture standing.
This is obviously an endlessly iterating game, but in this current iteration, I think that the curve might be slow, but the parallel Muslim cultures growing in the West and supported by the Dar-al-Islam, are beginning to outcompete the societies they are embedded in while retaining and even doubling down on their, uhhhh, less than fully feminist laws and cultural traits.
Could this change? Of course. It didn’t take the Chinese very long to out-compete the Mongols via a different strategy, after all. But that strategy is not a silver bullet. The Tatar Yoke wasn’t lifted by the Golden Horde converting to dome-based architecture and Orthodoxy, after all.
So, I don’t count “We have more bridges, McDonalds, and better military toys” as a definitive killer app in the endless war between peoples/nations/cultures.
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