I am of a similar vintage. Technically, I was in hardware/firmware in '89, but I was working in a startup then and the lines were pretty blurry - I wrote a good

I am of a similar vintage. Technically, I was in hardware/firmware in '89, but I was working in a startup then and the lines were pretty blurry - I wrote a good bit of assembly & C code. One thing that I notice was that even though there wasn't really any sort of formal push to get women into tech back then, the software group was pretty close to 50% women where I was working in the late 80s - in fact, for a while there were more women than men in the group. Similar at the next couple of companies I worked in software into the mid-to-late 90s - maybe not 50% women, but pretty close. But then in the aughts that gender distribution tended to skew more towards males. Not sure why that was. And now I'm working in a startup where it's about 40% women, so maybe we're getting back to where we were in the late 80s.