[XorNot]

And again, in the 1970s the internet - and multiplayer gaming with a social component - effectively did not exist as a widespread hobby.

This is cherrypicking in the most bizarre way: if you can't explain the earlier oscillation, why should I accept the later oscillation? Which also doesn't line up with the type internet gaming which was exploited around the 2010s mark where alt-right groups began aggressively recruiting out of the gaming community via the "gamergate" movement.

In every case you're datapoints don't make any sense - there weren't 12 years olds playing Call Of Duty in 1985 and learning to scream racial and sexual epithets in voice chat. Games with a substantial violent component - the first person shooters - Wolfenstein 3D came out in 1992.

Which still doesn't actually explain anything, because it's not remotely clear how "shooting nazis" lines up with excluding women from CS.

[ergothus]

> if you can't explain the earlier oscillation, why should I accept the later oscillation

Clearly women in the 1970s had no other obstacles - they couldn't obtain credit(!), much less be on equal footing in so many other ways. The issue is not "but there is an earlier oscillation", it's "if women have been slowly moving in direction of equality, what reversed that?" or "If women were able to 'be interested' back then, how can we claim they aren't now"?

[XorNot]

Women started being excluded once computing was considered a "serious" career path and salaries ticked up. Before then serious engineering was mechanical engineering, chemistry, physics.

Sexist (and racial) exclusionary behavior ticks up once a field becomes commoditized and the general populace move on in, because the general populace carry with them the prevailing attitudes of the times.