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On the one hand, it's true that people who enshrined differential treatment in law based on sex and ethnicity did not understand the genetic basis for the differences between groups, as legislation of this kind predated our modern understanding of genetics. On the other hand, they obviously had some kind of intuitive understanding of the psychological differences between men and women, or white people and black people, even if they didn't understand the mechanisms underpinning said differences. This results in a situation like that described by Joseph Henrich, where a proposed explanation for a phenomenon is factually wrong but nonetheless produces accurate and useful predictions. "Women tend to take a close interest in children for reasons of genetics and evolutionary psychology" is factually true; "women tend to take a close interest in children because God created them as a helpmeet for men" is factually false, and yet the latter explanation still produces useful predictions. If you were to ask a gender studies professor and an uneducated Catholic living in the sixteenth century which kinds of careers women would tend to pursue if there were no obstacles in their way, I'd hazard a guess that the latter would give you more accurate answers. Consider the "paradox" that more liberal and economically free nations tend to have more stratified sex ratios in STEM, childcare etc.: it's only a "paradox" if you accept the false premise that men and women are psychologically the same and want the same things, on average.
I don't buy the stock woke narrative that white males historically conspired to oppress women and people of colour out of sheer bloody-mindedness. People in the past didn't need Gregor Mendel to tell them that men and women tend to have innately different interests, temperaments and priorities: up untill about ten minutes ago, this was seen as so obvious as to hardly even be worth mentioning. (That's why I think woke efforts to bury journal articles which produce politically incorrect findings are both infuriating and futile: so many of these articles are just telling us what we already know. "Newsflash: across cultures, female children like playing with dolls while male children like playing with fire trucks, suggesting that sex differences are innate." Get out of town. Next you'll be telling me water is wet.) I don't think denying women the franchise was a morally good idea, but it was obviously a decision made on the back of lawmakers' intuitive understanding of the psychological differences between men and women, even if they didn't understand the mechanism that caused these differences. They didn't just do it out of spite.
This actually gets to why conservatism is often a good system without very good reasons to do something different. Evolutionary pressures would tend to select a tribe to grow if their beliefs produce positive results.
Tribe A: Men stay home with kids. Women get weapons and fight tribe B for the best agricultural land.
Tribe B: women take care of kids. Men fight rival tribe.
Which Gods tribe A and B pray to does not matter. Tribe B will kills the babysitting male tribe and turn their women into sex slaves.
Tribe B beliefs are now the beliefs of the now larger tribe B combined with tribe A.
Yes, cultural evolution in a nutshell.
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