This is awkward. I get that there's sexism in tech, no argument there. But it's just not true that web design was sprung from whole cloth as a new discipline

This is awkward. I get that there's sexism in tech, no argument there. But it's just not true that web design was sprung from whole cloth as a new discipline and then later became gendered at women coders' expense. I was there in the 90s, and designers were already there, and yes there was already gender bias. The thing was, the bulk of designers in the 90s used PageMaker/InDesign/Illustrator and it took a while for that discipline to converge with HCI and UI design. These things sort of converged in the web world later, and yes there was gender bias, but that bias existed historically. Furthermore, if you go further back, before my time, there was much greater representation of women in programming and "making computers go beep boop" which had steadily declined over many decades. I won't presume to analyze the root causes of gender bias in tech, but it's just lazy thinking to blame the decline of the hybrid designer/coder as being due to sexism and "role gendering". The more obvious answer is that the depth of expertise needed for modern UX design and front-end development grew by a lot, and hence the generic "web designer" role disappeared in favor of greater specialization. Blaming this on the patriarchy might get you sympathy and clicks in the current zeitgest, but it doesn't really say antyhing about causality or what's actually going on.