For one thing I guess in these times the keyboard was still something associated with a female role. Then what perhaps also contributed is the roles of workers

For one thing I guess in these times the keyboard was still something associated with a female role. Then what perhaps also contributed is the roles of workers by collar color. Coding was perhaps more considered manual labor (blue collar). Yet people seem to forget it's actually the computers doing the manual labor. The developer is much more a complex designer role thinking up the execution architecture. So we got the waterfall movement where it was believed the higher payed intellectual roles didn't need to know how to code. I think this caused many men and women shifting towards those roles. We got the feminist movement which was very much focused on getting women into those higher payed top jobs. Coding wasn't considered one of those. Then perhaps the education system is partly to blame. It has become a commercial enterprise making sexy promises for a future life. In earlier times it was more common to start at the bottom and work/promote your way up the career ladder. You would move up because you were more valuable doing other things. Other people could take over parts of your job. In our current time the idea is that you can just get some university degree, skip all the lower jobs and stream in sideways. This leaves the "upper jobs" somewhat disconnected from the "lower jobs". It perhaps causes some dysfunctional organizations. Especially in Europe. I think this is what "the establishment" dictates. Meanwhile there were still those creative people getting their hands dirty hacking up cool solutions in their basements, garages and attics. Much more driven by a certain attitude than the safety and promises of a certain education. Their products simply outperformed the ones coming from the establishment. We get the weird situation we see today.