Not necessarily. It could enable a more radical reversion to something like a palace economy, where political and economic power are fully concentrated into an elite and away from the people, who are then made dependent on gifts from those elites for survival and comfort.
People nowadays concentrate on money like it's something fundamental, but it isn't (e.g. Putin can be richer and more powerful than all of us, without owning a kopeck). Money is only a proxy for prestige and power in our current social system, and other systems are possible.
Musk and co are not suffering.
This culture is a joke. None of us are going to Mars and the beyond but we’re setting us and ours aside for another high minded story about forever human prosperity and growth. Nevermind no science allows for humans to live among the stars. Every frame of reference so far as only seen them tightly coupled to Earth.
It’s clear human biology is capable of a philosophy that diverges wildly from reality. No reason at all to see this period in human society, and the people that make it up, as any less susceptible to propaganda and any more capable of their forever stories than the ancient Greeks.
They may not be spewing the syntax of religion, but the semantic meaning demanded by the powers that be are no different; kowtow to the visions and hallucinations of the almighty.
This precariousness is compounded by international trade, making the value of kopecks at least partly dependent on economic performance. (In a perfectly insular economy, Putin would have much more control over kopecks, including fungibility, but you can't regress to such insularity without destroying most wealth in the country.)
Notably, Putin has plenty of kopecks stashed overseas, presumably partly out of concern for the precariousness of his situation, or at least that of his family's fortunes.
Money isn't power, per se. Control over social media isn't power, per se. Voting isn't power, per se. But it's difficult to discuss power without discussing the mediums by which it's exercised and allotted. In particular, power exercised through one medium might not be readily transferred to another medium.
I don't know why you picked Caltech specifically, but even confining ourselves to the US, women could attend university much earlier - a few examples from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_women's_education:
1831: As a private institution in 1831, Mississippi College became the first coeducational college in the United States to grant a degree to a woman. In December 1831 it granted degrees to two women, Alice Robinson and Catherine Hall.
1855: University of Iowa becomes the first coeducational public or state university in the United States.
1866: Sarah Jane Woodson Early became the first African-American woman to serve as a professor. Xenia, Ohio's Wilberforce University hired her to teach Latin and English in 1866.
1870: The Board of Regents of the University of California ruled that women should be admitted on an equal basis with men. With the completion of North and South Halls in 1873, the university relocated to its Berkeley location with 167 male and 22 female students.
"will" is an unnecessary word. That started happening with the electronics revolution in 1970s triggering the robotics revolution and automating factories. That's the reason for increasing wealth concentration. Which, the Western governments tried to combat by floating the economy on debt. That blew up in 2008. So here we are, living the aftermath of the crash of capitalism that Marx said would happen due to increasing technology and automation putting majority of people out of work and there remaining no way for them to buy the products that the economy produces, putting the economy into a crisis.
We are already seeing this outcome. About 2/3 (!) of Americans live paycheck to paycheck [1], 56% of Americans have less than 1000$ in liquid savings for emergencies [2]. In Europe, the situation is better because we have somewhat decent social safety nets, but not that much (e.g. in Germany, thanks to inflation, record numbers of people depend on charities like food banks [6] which are essentially funded by donations from large supermarket chains).
At the same time, a lot of the largest employers [3] in the US - especially Amazon, Target and Walmart - stand to benefit massively from automation gains... meaning that a lot of their staff will be made redundant as technology improves. Amazon is continuously investing in warehouse automation to replace human "pickers", and supermarket chains are investing in automation e.g. to spot spills [4] or monitor shelves for stuff out of stock [5].
Individual companies are not to blame for this per se: capitalism incentivizes a company to reduce costs wherever possible. The answer to the resulting shift of profits and wealth, however, must be in politics - and to be honest, if the wealth gap keeps rising with people like Bezos or Musk being worth hundreds of billions of dollars each while the 99% lose their homes and die because they can't afford basic medicine like insulin, if politics don't do anything, social unrest will only keep growing. Occupy Wall Street, the 2016 election of the 45th, French Yellow Vest protests - they all were, at their core, protests against this wealth disparity, against the effective neo-feudalism towards which we have devolved.
And to make the situation even worse than it already is: taxpayers worldwide will have to pay down the enormous bills from COVID relief debt and investments to combat climate change (e.g. constructing new power grids and renewable-energy plants), the followup costs of the Russian invasion in Ukraine and potentially a third world war - but there is no sign at all in any Western country that the rich will pay their fair share for all this crap.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/11/two-thirds-of-americans-live...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/19/56percent-of-americans-cant-...
[3] https://largest.org/misc/employers-usa/
[4] https://mashable.com/article/stop-and-shop-marty-robots
[5] https://www.roboticsbusinessreview.com/retail-hospitality/5-...
[6] https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/situation-tafeln-101.html
Modern economic theory is a fig leaf over the raw reality of resource allocation. A better fig leaf than most, but still a fig leaf. In particular, there are many macro metastable equilibrium points, post-WW2 middle-class America being the exception rather than the rule. Fewer people, true, but with vastly higher purchase power than the masses.
Considering how high American incomes tend to be compared to the rest of the world, this seems like a culture of spendthrift irresponsibility.
Meanwhile, the rest of the developed Western world has the government provide healthcare, pension systems, actual sick time that also accounts for longer periods, public transport so you can get away without a car...
It's a cultural issue.
To use a 200 year old quote: "They should eat cakes instead".
Someone with absolutely no money to spare absolutely cannot set aside 10% of their income - and even if they manage to do so, it's all one healthcare or other emergency away from being wiped out.
The first automatic washing machines were introduced in the USA in 1937; a decade later women played important roles in wartime manufacturing during WWII, and by 1970 universities like Caltech finally opened their doors to female students.
It's possible that some new technology - AI-assisted robotic automation in particular - could have a similar societal impact by eliminating many jobs and concentrating wealth in the hands of the owners of the manufacturing lines, although this would seem to be a self-defeating outcome as fewer people would be able to purchase the output. An alternative result would be something like an average 30-hr work week with no change in economic earnings for the vast majority of people.