Nope, wrong term. NB: I’m a sociologist, so please don’t throw a dictionary at me in response. 
Instead, the more deeply researched and unpretentious term, is simply “development”. Don’t let “development” get subsumed by “evolution”! Societies develop, they don’t “evolve” like turning the thinking about people over to (dirt-oriented, not people-oriented) biologists.
Human-social development is a non-evolutionary topic because choice, teleology, agency, and purpose are involved. There are different ways possible for thinking about “social change” (over time) than reverting to myopic “evolutionary” language from biologists.
Evolutionary social thinkers are almost entirely atheists & agnostics. Were you aware of this, knor Kai? The field of evolutionary religious studies is so terribly wrong, it’s not even wrong, and some protestants are heaping praise on mainly atheist views about “religion”. Would you support “evolutionary religious studies” by agnostics & atheists telling you how to think about “religion”?!
“the direction of evolution in human societies seems to have changed during the last century.”
This sentence is both empty of meaningful content & self-contradictory. Change is the master category. “Evolution” is meaningless here; wrong term. Development instead brings specificity. Likewise, “direction” = “telos” = “non-evolutionary” given the “directing” of natural history by agents.