According to him, programming especially in the batch era was a highly social and manpower intensive activity with a large community of support staff and operators around the computer. People who wrote the actual instructions did so on coding sheets, which they would hand over to punchcard operators who would punch them out, and then they would be given to computer operators who would feed them to the computer.

The majority of the operations staff in these computing centers were female, but the majority of the people writing the instructions on the coding sheets were male.

The rapid decline of women in computing pretty much corresponds to when a lot of these support roles were going away with the rise of interactive computing.

That being said I've personally met a lot of really excellent female programmers. I do think there is a tendency to steer women out of the industry or into product or planning roles. Based on that book though I think the narrative of "computing used to be mostly female before they were pushed out by spergy males" misunderstands the structure of the early computer industry and how it changed with evolving technology.

You're using some loaded terms there. How exactly did men "push" women out of computing?

Women were just as free as men to create their own tech startups. Yet in the past 50 years most tech startups and today's tech giants were created by men. Some women are tech entrepreneurs today, but the field is highly male dominated. We see the same ratio in engineering education, and in most companies not actively discriminating against male candidates.

The idea that there is some systemic discrimination against women in tech is ridiculous. There are specific cases of wage gap some companies need to address (which is a general problem not exclusive to tech), but most companies would hire capable women if they applied. Yet they rarely do.

That was true when computing was running tabulating machines. That led to the early ENIAC programmers (all 6 of them) being women since they had traditionally run the tabulating machines. However men had been programming before this (e.g., Zuse, others developing hardware and testing it).

Once "computing" became what modern people think of as programming, men dominated, not because of sudden sex discrimination or exclusion in computing, but because the input pipeline of what a programmer did changed to people coming from academia instead.

The first computer science degree in the world (Cambridge 1953) drew students of math and engineering. The first in the US (Purdue, 1962, first MS degrees 1964, first PhDs 1966) did the same.

So it's likely as the field expanded women were not pushed out as much as more men joined in.

The pre personal computer days had an army of women in computing.

The UK had “Steve” Shirley, she built a billionaire dollar tech company in the 1960s https://www.computer.org/publications/tech-news/research/dam...

Growing up it was largely women that taught me how to fly and maintain aircraft, how to set the timing on shot holes to take apart square kilmetres of iron band mesa, to build robots (long before Boston Dynamics), to write exploration geophysics software, serious combinatorics, etc.