> Unless you missed the sarcasm tag completely, you can't use history to define what causes segregation. It don't stand up to the scientific method, it create circular logic, and its frankly lazy.

That's a nice general statement, but it's unclear to me what you think I've been trying to establish and why you think I failed to do that. Anyway, all I tried was to provide some examples that clearly demonstrate the existence of social marginalization of women; not to exclude additional causes nor to present the complete theory.

> First establish a theory.

We have.

> Then use theory to predict the world.

That's not quite the methodology in some intractable fields. In some intractable fields we prefer to explain historic events rather than try to make future predictions. It's less rigorous but it's the best we can do, both because of inherent intractability and because of time-scales and human scales (i.e. number of people) involved and other problems that make lab experiments difficult.

> Show data that support that given a starting point and a influence you end up with data similar to current, and then address potential problems.

Done.

> Finally compare the theory to other theories that also can correctly predict and see which one is better.

Yep. That's precisely most of the work being done.

> Only if all fails should you get into camps and start the ideological battle like the one you are doing

I haven't even started the ideological debate, and the theory I presented is so mainstream that I doubt any serious scholar contends it at all, and therefore did not know it requires further support here in addition to the mountains of evidence we've accumulated over the years, and is available to anyone who's even slightly interested in the subject with a simple Google Scholar search. However, you are very wrong about how ideology find their way into science, as the article we're discussing demonstrates: scientists judge the quality of a research based on how well it conforms with their ideology. This is something we just have to acknowledge, and yet one more problem these fields of study have to contend with that others, like physics, don't (or, at least, not to a similar degree).

And look, I am quite familiar with both scientific methodology and historiographical methodology. What you want is either already most of what's being done or not the correct methodology. If you've actually read the scholarly debates, you'll see that the methodology is not too far from where we'd want it to be (sure, there are places where it can be more rigorous, but the same goes for medicine). It appears that you base your criticims based on some mental image you have that doesn't quite square with reality. It's as if you haven't actually looked at social scholarship at all.

Also, it's unclear to me what hypotheses (for example, for the cause of women being denied the vote or attending university) do you think are being dismissed.

Finally, it's unclear to me why you think that the political action you're hinting at depends on a very specific causal explanation. What hypothesis for the cause of women being denied entrance to universities would negate the political action that has brought us to where we are today? In other words, the only hypothesis that would make political action ineffective (and bear in mind that historically it's been very effective) is that 1. there are no significant social causes in the marginalization of women and 2. the effects are such that social action cannot change them (actually 2 subsumes 1). Otherwise, political action is both justified and necessary. What supportable hypothesis of that kind would you propose?