I was taken more by the lack of historical grounding of the students in the story. Then I remembered two things:

1) The journalist probably didn't have dig hard, but could easily have cherry-picked a fun interaction for story color. 2) Most history is taught as iconoclasm until the college level, leaving most college students with just a vauge idea of how events happened and why.

I think it more important to show that women have always been part of computing and that they, traditionally, did not get the desired work. They got the parts the men did not want. The "lack" of women in Computer Science then becomes a challenge: Can you highlight and surpass the work of the un-sung who came before?