NYT: “MEN invented the internet”

But we are talking about a particular invention and it's invention has been well documented (see "Where Wizards Stay Up Late" among I'm sure many others). If there's some alternative history here please point me to it...

part from that, saying that women did not contribute enough to the Internet, is like saying black people did not contribute enough to the invention of cars; it's mostly true, but it could be argued that that's because they were an oppressed group.

So woman *could" have contributed more to the Internet had they not been oppressed? That's a counterfactual argument one and two it doesn't change the fact that women didn't partake.

That is indeed an interesting juxtaposition, and I'd particularly note the use of the word "enough." That would suggest that in discussions on the history of technology, it is implied that there is some arbitrary threshold at which mentions of the contributions of a minority group (not necessarily an identity minority; i.e. in a women-dominated field you'd say the minority is the men, etc.) will be disqualified.

For instance, it is indeed "mostly true" that black people did not make many contributions to the automotive industry or its technological development. Richard Spikes' contribution of turn signals (http://www.snopes.com/business/origins/blackinv.asp) is perhaps notable or even significant, but not necessarily critical, so this could serve as an example of that statement. Does that mean that the hypothetical phrase "White men invented the modern automobile" in a hypothetical article about a black man being ostracized from the auto industry in 2012 is racist? Or is it merely an acknowledgment of the fact that white men get the credit because they structured the industry to give it to them, by excluding everyone else? Or is it both?

And as a matter of fact, the contributions of men did heavily outweigh the contributions of women because women at the time were NOT ALLOWED to become engineers in most of the United States. In the rare places where it was allowed, high school advisors discouraged women from going to college and college advisors discouraged women from taking advanced math. Society was generally sexist and the potential for women to contribute was suppressed.

In the tech industry, women were allowed to become computer operators because it was seen as a natural progression from being typewriter operators, and because the tech industry was more progressive than the NYT gives it credit for. The heavy math, engineering, and design work was mostly done by men because, with rare exceptions like Hopper, they were the only ones with the skills and training to do it.