My grandmother who is in her 80s was one of the US military's first female programmers... and she was a widow... and she was German expatriate (as you can imagine the difficulty of that post WWII). They programmed in punch cards and drank a lot of coffee.

If it sounds like I am bragging.. I am.. I am very proud of her. What I'm not proud of is not spending enough time with her to extract more details. I did ask her a similar question about being a German widow working with predominately males and she basically had the same answer as the articles mother... "no problems what so ever".

This article is a great reminder that I need to call my grandmother more often :)