I've heard this before but I read a book called "Computing in the Middle Ages" which was a memoir of a man who worked on the SAGE, LINC and Xerox Parc projects.

I've heard this before but I read a book called "Computing in the Middle Ages" which was a memoir of a man who worked on the SAGE, LINC and Xerox Parc projects. According to him, programming especially in the batch era was a highly social and manpower intensive activity with a large community of support staff and operators around the computer. People who wrote the actual instructions did so on coding sheets, which they would hand over to punchcard operators who would punch them out, and then they would be given to computer operators who would feed them to the computer. The majority of the operations staff in these computing centers were female, but the majority of the people writing the instructions on the coding sheets were male. The rapid decline of women in computing pretty much corresponds to when a lot of these support roles were going away with the rise of interactive computing. That being said I've personally met a lot of really excellent female programmers. I do think there is a tendency to steer women out of the industry or into product or planning roles. Based on that book though I think the narrative of "computing used to be mostly female before they were pushed out by spergy males" misunderstands the structure of the early computer industry and how it changed with evolving technology.