I don't think it says anything. The vast majority of the seminal papers were written in the 60's and 70's, when few women were even in academia in the first pla

I don't think it says anything. The vast majority of the seminal papers were written in the 60's and 70's, when few women were even in academia in the first place. A good number are from the 80's, during which you can argue very little emphasis was placed on women in engineering at all. By the nineties we were trying harder to equalize the gap, but it was not yet a priority in the field of CS. The last papers on here are from 2000. Basically, if you know the history of women in academia, the lack of women on this list is absolutely no surprise. What do you expect people to do, pretend that there was a surplus of female researchers when the really widely applicable research was happening? That's simply not true, and it wouldn't be true in any field.