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Because we don't have to focus energy on difficult, time-consuming pursuits like survival skills, hunting, subsistence farming and all that jazz, we have more time to dedicate to more intellectual pursuits. This is borne out heavily in how fast technology and science advance in the modern age.
This also enables women to have more say than they did back in the bad old days. Back then, men did most of the heavy lifting and women (and children) were sheltered, protected and denied agency. This was primarily because life was much more dangerous and hostile than it is now, and men are biologically expendable while women were certainly not. Society designed itself to protect females and their offspring, and protecting them often meant hoarding them away like treasures, denying them basic autonomy and freedoms in the name of self-preservation (among other reasons).
Now, though, making babies isn't quite as important as it used to be. We're more worried about overpopulation and resource scarcity than extinction at this point. So now, thanks to modern technology, modern science and medicine, and modern civilization, women can have the agency that they really never had in the past.
The "dumbing down" is more compartmentalized than this overall progress and can be strongly linked to media and political meddling. The 90s brought us a false sense of self-worth and self-esteem, the idea that "everyone's a winner" instead of accurately gauging a person's competence. The Dunning-Kruger effect is in, well, full effect here--those who have little knowledge in a given field tend to be completely unable to judge their own (or others') competence in said field.
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