a) there are efforts to get women involved in the tech industry, but there is still a lot of discrimination
b) the article describes programmers from the 1960's
Women computers were replaced by software definable processors, not by software engineers.
The mathematicians/engineers were more like architects, and the women programmers weren’t merely compilers or input technicians. They actually wrote code, though this was also considered a drudge task back then (a view that was corrected later). Also, proximity to the hardware allowed many to grow out of their original job descriptions.