Let's take a trip to a parallel Universe

 I proposed this question to my students.

Let's take a trip to a parallel Universe. Suppose for a moment that since the fifth century before the Christian Era (about 2,500 years ago), human beings had achieved gender equality. 

What science and what technology would we have today?

 

A possible answer. Gender equality implies class equality. Otherwise, a slave woman would not have gender equality in relation to a free man, nor would a slave man have gender equality in relation to a free woman. Since there is only one class in the world, there would be neither rich nor poor people. As there are neither rich nor poor, capital gains would not be generated based on slave labor or underpaid labor. The trade would be fair, with minimal margins of capital gains, the equivalent to whatever the average wage would be. Furthermore, human communities would not have capital gains to generate industries beyond non-slave handicrafts. By having equality worldwide, there would be no wars, we would not need war technology. The control and use of metals and raw materials based neither on trade nor on industry would generate a lower number of produced objects (much lower than those found, say, in Classical Antiquity itself). Our technology would not be anywhere near what we have today in the First World. On the material plane, we would have advanced very little, but our psychological and spiritual capacities would be much more developed than they are today. Neither algebra, linked to commerce, nor calculus, linked to the needs of exploration and conquest of the world, would have been developed. We would have much more artistic mathematics, in many points indistinguishable from what we now call music theory. And therefore, the sciences would be of a very different character. The ecological and population problems would not have occurred. The arts would be at the level of our psychological capacities, etc...

But all this is only on the basis that we have achieved gender equality and therefore human equality at all levels. This equilibrium is as desirable as it is highly unstable. Very little against it would make it collapse. It would be enough for someone to want to dominate someone, even at a very basic psychological level, to break down the whole house of cards. Like the small stone that falls on the mountain and produces the avalanche. The most probable thing is that in a couple of generations after reaching the goal of gender equality, somewhere on the planet that is less favored in resources, or after a famine, someone would start a revolt that would end in war, dragging the balance of all the others. And we would go back to something similar to what we have today.

With great probability, the parallel universe described in the question would end up converging on ours. The solution to our problems is much more difficult than we think. It is necessary to build a new society based on idealistic and egalitarian principles, yes, but perhaps we will have to accept submitting ourselves to a psychological change of greater depth than the one that our social system presents to us right now. Only by changing ourselves can technology change. How do we do that?