[dabraham1248]

We read different history books.

In the 40s, the 6 people hired to program the ENIAC were all female. google "ENIAC girls". _Cosmopolitan_ ran articles about how programming was one of the few professional fields open to women. Managers thought that programming was basically just typing, so they hired women.

But then people started to realize it was more than just typing. So as the field started to get prestige in the mid 60s, companies started to look for things like college degrees and "personality tests", both of which were biased towards men.

[erik_seaberg]

“Systems analyst” and “programmer” used to be separate jobs. The former worked on paper, the latter typed what they were told to into a keypunch (not a terminal, because computer time was expensive). Eventually the “programmer” job became obsolete when we could afford to let analysts run their own text editors and compilers.

[jacquesm]

Almost correct.

Systems analyst was the person writing up an extremely detailed specification of what a program was supposed to do, which a programmer then implemented in a particular language.

The two merged at some point, when the demarcation line between the two of them became vaguer and overlapped more. This more or less coincided with more powerful 'frameworks' (if the name even applies) and libraries becoming available, as well as a massive increase in computing power which allowed for a near real-time edit-compile-test cycle which made programmers so much more productive that they suddenly weren't the bottle-neck in the process any more.

Another factor was that plenty of 'hobby' programmers found their way into professional IT jobs and they'd been doing this 'programmer/analyst' hybrid thing all along so for them it was a natural to continue to do so.

This happened somewhere in the mid 80's.

Then the web happened and the analyst job eventually became much more high level, nowadays we'd call a person that does work related to what an analyst used to do product owner or similar.

All of these definitions have meant different things at different points in time.

[mixmastamyk]

WWII did significantly boost the number of women in the workplace for obvious reasons. "Top Secret Rosies" is a good doc about this era.

Some permanently some temporarily, but the boost was mostly gone in computing by the 80s... the cohort we're talking about here.