Certainly. Non-hegemonic groups are marginalized from seats of power. After a long struggle, they may increase participation. Put another way: groups with more power tend to preserve and increase the power difference between them and less powerful groups, while the less-powerful groups may gain a share of the power after a struggle.
Sadly, it's not my theory, but one of the most elementary theories -- backed by countless evidence -- of the social sciences, supported by studies in anthropology, sociology and history (with some backup from social psychology, too).
Can you state your theory clearly, or, at the very least, state what evidence compels you to doubt the current scientific consensus?
> Make sure to include a clear definition of "power", and make sure this definition is clear enough that I can at the very least evaluate "more" and "less" power.
I have done so on numerous occasions in the past in our conversations. Please refer to them or look up "power" on Wikipedia. The short description is influence, and if you'd like a description with a more quantitative "feel", I'd say the power a person has is the number of people they can influence indirectly (i.e. graph reach) summed over the magnitude in the change of behavior they cause in each affected individual.
> I.e., I have no idea why you consider academic physics to have more power than academic biology
I don't. See my other response to you.
> Are you implying that women don't make individual career choices based on their interest and aptitude, but instead "concentrate [their] efforts" in some sort of collectivist power grab?
I'm stating the much-observed, well-known fact, that society pushes and directs us in various directions. What we see as "free choice" is, in fact, "free choice under societal pressures and restrictions". That behavior is not collective but individual, only biased. Just like any fair coin is free to make a choice how to land, yet we can make very accurate predictions on the result of a thousand coin tosses. Collective behavior is not always the result of collective decisions.
> I always thought women were just people like me, making selfish individual decisions to maximize their money/lifestyle/career enjoyment.
All of us make selfish individual decisions, but the (probabilistic) fitness function is largely determined by large-scale, emergent properties of the system. Think of individual particle movement and temperature or of Brownian motion. There are no collective decisions involved -- only individual "decisions" and local interaction -- yet the end result is that global factors heavily influence the distribution in behavior of the individuals. The effect of social influence on personal choice has been heavily studied in social psychology, and, in fact, in zoology too.