Short Answer
It depends on your metaphysical presuppositons. What you are asking is a question regarding the normativity of explanation. So, depending on whether you're inclined towards critical theory, history, or science, one's notion of admissible and persuasive evidence are a function of one's first principles. Let's explicate.
Long Answer
Indirect Answer
Ever hear the expression, when in Rome, do as the Romans do? Well, publishing papers falls under the same dictum. One has to walk the walk, and talk the talk of the locals to get any respect. That means, each language community, has a different understanding of the concepts of 'proof', 'evidence', and 'explanation'. I've done the most reading on the philosophy of science, and the least on critical theory, so I'll start there.
First, the notion of scientific explanation can be contentious even among scientists. Science in the spirit of Comte's postivism has always sought to push for the empirical and objective. Thus, scientific explanation attempts to distance itself from intuition and bias. I'm a proponent of scientism, so it should come as no surprise that I advocate scientific theories of explanation (IEP) of which arguments can become quite technical starting with the deductive-nomological and advancing through alternative formulations, such as those of Cummin's and others. Just what exactly does it mean to explain? (My own biases project from a naturalized epistemology and take into account the psychological need to reduce cognitive dissonance).
While details are many, what is fair to say is that the nature of explanation of critical theorists, historians, and physical scientists can diverge in quite distant ways. So, when you ask does a feminist explanatory narrative that minimizes historicity and maximizes ethical claims prove, offer sufficient evidence, or adequately characterize a causal relationship between biological sex and occupation, you're going to be entering a relativist situation. Such an explanation is absolutely more convincing to that language community, which is why they use it.
Will such an explanation even satisfy a historian? Probably not, though it might have probative value to the historian. A historian, after all is in the business of converting historical artifacts into explanations in a way a feminist may neglect. So, a historian may down play ethical considerations and emphasize facts, methods, and theories conducive to her own community.
And a scientist? Most scientists seek to strip historicity right out of explanation if they can help it. Functional theories of explanations, in biology for instance, may appeal to temporal notions of ontogeny, phylogeny, or natural selection, but the emphasis is usually on more immediate functional or structural claims regarding empirical evidence seeking to obscure agency and reduce the misrepresentations of phenomenological discourse. Hence, Dennett coined heterophenomology to label such communal processes.
So what's going on here? How does one fully account for these different notions of argumentation and explanation? The most reasonable approach is simply to embrace a pluralistic notion of explanation. One easy way to do that is to accept that these distinct language communities are involved in a social process of constructing a social reality. Both Berger and Luckmann's work and Searle's work have conducted philosophical research in this direction, and this might be recognized as social constructivism. Now, with that philosophical springboard, we can respond to your question.
Direct Answer
Does a feminist narrative satisfy explanation? To a sophisticated thinker, at best probably only partially. Why so? Because from an epistemological perspective, there is simply more than one method of arriving at justification, the logical portion of moving from belief to knowledge. If one selects the presumptions of the feminist, than one can devise a strong and cogent feminist argument. The same can be said of a top-notch historian, and a top-notch social scientist. And the question a philosopher must ask herself is, is any one of these views, from a metaphysical perspective privileged? She may find the answer is yes. Or no. For me, the answer is I prefer naturalism and the tools of science. It is not that the feminist or the historian's position is inherently bad, but as a first principle, I believe that activities of feminists and historians and scientists too are driven by psychology, and thus, I partially reduce their explanations to psychological ones to unify them with my worldview. Concepts are simply constructions of the mind. Not everyone agrees!
Is there scientific weight to be found in the feminist's appeals? Certainly, dominance hierarchies, patriarchies, and the suppression of women suffrage are evident in societies today. And historically this is even more the case. And what about appeals of biology? Well, the fact is, that when measures of central tendencies, like the Bell curve, have even very small differences in median values, the extreme ends can manifest extreme imbalances in proportionality. Thus, if men have a slight intellectual advantage in intelligence(s) (very complicated notion itself), then three things are manifestly true:
- One cannot conflate the medians of the groups with the probabilities of the individuals in the groups. Any man and woman at random should manifest a near-equal set of permutations regarding an inferiority-superiority pairing.
- The two distributions will overlap to a great extent depending on the differences in the median. It may be that the distributions are 99.9999% overlapped.
- The extreme ends of the distribution will present as being HIGHLY imbalanced between the two groups. Hence, in a question of upper-body strength, where men enjoy an advantage as a group, the top 0.1% of men and women will be nearly all men. That's the most likely explanation, for instance, of why transgendered women crush the competition in athletics and why competition is segregated in the first place. There are fundamental differences in the anatomy and physiology of top-ranked athletes of the two sexes. Technically put, the procedures to go from cis-male to trans-female don't fully offset sexual dimorphism.
How does one explain the gender gap? The clever thinker will buttress any argument with the best elements of all the explanations. Women are discriminated against and sexually harassed much more than men. There are historical traditions perpetuated through folkways and mores and educational practices. In math education, biases are often found in research of the disparity. And the most weighty factor may be not that average men are better suited for STEM than average women, but that the world's best-suited candidates for STEM are 95% men by a variety of biological and psychological traits in the same way the fastest marathon runners in the world are nearly all men. That last idea grates against certain ideologies, but it is what the science points at.