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Not to be a pedant, but historically computing was considered "womens work" in its initial stages.

I would address the the actual problematic elements of your comment, but I'm afraid in this forum such communication usually falls on deaf ears. Suffice it to say its easy to have a fatalist attitude towards "idiocy" when you're not the target in question.

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>Not to be a pedant, but historically computing was considered "womens work" in its initial stages.

It's becoming quite fashionable to bring this up lately, as if its inherently a trump card to the discussion. The obvious follow up to this statement should be to ask: why did the state of things change? Without any attempt at getting to the bottom of why things changed, the statement itself seems to create more ambiguity rather than clarity.

Were women hired for software design back then? That sounds surprisingly open-minded for the day. I thought they were mostly doing data entry (e.g., software which had already been written on paper) as a transition from stenography. This was the distinction between "systems analyst" and "programmer" before one person was expected to do both.

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