"This idea that computers are for boys became a narrative. It became the story we told ourselves about the computing revolution. It helped define who geeks were

"This idea that computers are for boys became a narrative. It became the story we told ourselves about the computing revolution. It helped define who geeks were and it created techie culture." The facts seem to (rather) be that computers were no longer just toys, they were becoming serious tools. As such, "tool geeks" gravitated to computers. This hypothesis would explain the inevitable sexist outcome of the field with a simple explanation. It can also be verified objectively and orthogonally by looking at other "tool" drivem occuplations that seem to share a heavy gender bias. See, eg http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-male-dominated-industries-and-occupations-us-and-canada http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-male-dominated-indus... Playing with tools and machines is not so much sexist as it is anti-social more broadly speaking. It's not clear the both genders share similar preferences in thus regard. If you look at more "social" industries (or business functions) like in Media/publishing/advertising you tend to find a significant number of very successful/world class etc women in very high powered jobs. The bigger question is when did coding become so anti-social? And is/was this anti-social nature somehow necessary or functional?