Wouldn't 6+ great powers mean more innovation?
The number of GPs isn't the most important. As I said earlier, IMO, peace=structural changes (industrial revolution, internet revolution nowadays) whereas wartime=short but incredibly powerful boosts in already known technologies (related to war technologies of course, but which then impact the civilians).
Also, something tangentially related to technology: I feel like a lot of the women's liberation of the 20th century and the Civil Rights movements were caused by improving technology. With the advent of the washing machine and dishwasher, women could just pop in whatever needed to be cleaned and go do something else. This freeing up of time allowed for much greater liberty, since they didn't have to spend all day doing arduous chores. And the Civil Rights movements were greatly helped along by the television, as it put on full display for all to see the inequalities faced by racial minorities and made it impossible to ignore. In a world where consumer technologies such as these advance at least as fast as OTL, if not faster, social progress probably happens at a similar rate.
Yes, I agree, but technological progress is far from the only factor. Look at the incredibly wealthy countries of our time (Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar) that grant virtually no rights to women, and this doesn't seem to create huge stability problems (and contrary to many beliefs, these countries are far from being barbarians, but that's another matter). For racism, it's the same. Look at China, Israel or even Japan and South Korea, each with a different view of foreigners, close to racism by our Western standards, and yet they are quite rich countries. To put it simply, culture is as important as progress and wealth.
Look at the conservatism in the US in the 1950s, or the racism of the 1960s even in the face of the Civil Rights movement, or the conservatism of the 1970s and 1980s after the Vietnam War. West Germany was actually pretty conservative until at least the 1960s as well, if not later. People after the wars wanted a "return to normalcy", and while the war might temporarily force women and blacks into the army, it also gives the excuse that now that the war is over, we can kick them back out.
For me, the years 1960 to 1980 were, on the contrary, extremely “progressive”. Young people listened to the Rolling Stones who had very sexual messages in their songs and the Beatles openly took drugs and even gave a good image of the communist system in one of their hits (“Back in the USSR”). As a Western European, I know many intellectuals (mostly French, like Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir or German like Daniel Cohn-Bendit...) who were very popular among the students and defended causes like gay rights, Maoism, feminism and even pedophilia (in the 1970s, some French newspapers invited intellectuals who campaigned for the legalization of pedophilia, without much negative reaction). But I don't know, maybe it was just a Western European thing.
TL;DR: A world without WWI or WWII would probably have greater social progress than ours. Perhaps it's a bit less "in your face", but it would certainly still happen.
I don't see modern feminism, the LGBT movement, or even modern anti-racism happening in a world without WWI. These would be very very moderate versions of these movements and around 2000, IMO, you would only have basic rights for minorities (the right to vote and work for women, the legalization of homosexuality, but very far from gay marriage, and the ban on discriminating against someone because of their race, but not much).
And then, maybe we shouldn't talk about it too much, the moderators don't like discussions about politics at all.
