[Pxtl]

It's listed as "Computer Scientists and Systems Analysts/Network systems Analysts/Web Developers" and their dataset starts in 1970.

Their dataset shows it always being a male field - in fact, in 1970, it's even more male than now in their dataset. It shows a rise of women from '70 to '90, and then flat until today.

Since the launch of personal computers (the Altair in '71) was supposed to be the catalyst of the change of programming into a male field, I'm suprised to see the data directly contradicting that.

Perhaps it reflects a difference in job titles - "computer scientists" vs "programmers" if programming (the women's work) was titled separately because it was considered a more menial job.

[vilhelm_s]

The usual story (as told in Nathan Ensmenger's "The Computer Boys Take Over") has the change earlier than that. He says in the late 1940s to early 1950s lots of women were hired for "coding" positions, which at the time was seen as a a fairly unskilled, clerical work. In the 1950s, the division between high-level "programmers" and route "coders" disappeared, leaving just programmer-coders who did both, and as a result there was quite a few female programmers. Then in the 1960s the computer industry grew dramatically, but at the same time the image of what a programmer was, and what kind of characteristics made you a good programmer, also shifted a lot, and by the end of the 1960s it had become a very male field.

The personal computer revolution is usually mentioned in connection with a different trend. Throughout the 70s the proportion of female computer science majors was steadily climbing, then somewhere around 1984 this trend broke [1]. It's often said that this has something to do with video games becoming popular toys.

[1] https://www.ultrasaurus.com/2008/11/declining-number-of-wome...