I was a minor supporter, in honor of my mother, who got started with coding around 1950.
It's weird... when I was growing up, the only coders I knew were women -- my mother and a friend of mine whose mother was also some kind of programmer/data analyst. Later in life I was a little surprised to find the field was overwhelmingly dominated by men. I guess it's not surprising I found this wrong at an intuitive level.
I knew already that there was a huge divide in salary and culture between the highly paid software engineers at coastal startups + FAANG companies and all the folks that run critical infrastructure for state and local governments, health systems, and boring enterprise companies, but I wonder if the people in those roles tend to skew older and female too.
As an aside, I've heard coworkers at my previous coastal tech jobs express sentiments to the effect that the people described above who mostly work on Windows stacks aren't real engineers, or that there are good reasons for the vast pay disparities between these critical infrastructure folks and people working on Uber-but-for-clowns or whatever, and I think it's really silly.
Engineers like the ones you describe have more positive impact on the world in one day than I have had in the several years that I’ve been doing this.
I often dream about leaving big tech entirely and working solely on legacy software in an overlooked but important domain.
I guess the grass is always greener and all that.
If gender differences in attitudes to risk are true (at least to some extent) then the difference is explainable, e.g. startups are high risk/reward hence attract males; government low risk/reward will attract females.
They were almost all women, and they drove nice cars.