I find that npr article on marketing being the reason for the drop in girls doing College CS overstates it and is a bit unconvincing. I took up computing during

I find that npr article on marketing being the reason for the drop in girls doing College CS overstates it and is a bit unconvincing. I took up computing during the 80s as a kid in a small country that had no real computer marketing (or even market) at all - that didn't stop it being a practically male only thing. Even amongst the wider population of boys, it was only a tiny percentage who got into computers. And while the Apple example in the article they used did have a boy as the focus, prominently sitting next to him in the class was a girl doing the same stuff and a 50/50 mix of other kids in the background. There wasn't a "computers are for boys" message in that ad. And image searches for 80s home computer ads don't really show it was all exclusively male targeted ads anyway* - there were a lot of those cliched ones marketed at the whole stereotypical family though. If anything they were overly optimistic in their depictions of gender ratios compared to actual interest in the market. * Except for the Italian ones - yikes