I attended a talk given by a local author who wrote a book about his father being the first black software engineer at IBM, who joined with several women around 1950, and the gist was that it was mostly to take some heat off of them for this collaboration.

in kindness to the previous poster, they are being as direct and truthful as one can be on a platform that has tilted hard to the right in the past 5 years and where discussion of the alluded-to-salute is flagged [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42774621