[defrost]

Growing up in the 1970s in high school I met few people into math or computers, although there were a few.

Hardly surprising, perhaps, given it was the Kimberley.

Once I hit university nearly half the math stream was female, as were the staff in the computing services and early CS courses. Many had come across to Australia from Dartmouth (UK).

As PC's became more and more popular at home items purchased for boys to play games on the number of women in the mechanics of CS started to decline, veering more into law, medicine, and sociology.

[Martin_Silenus]

Yeah... schools ARE social places. Jobs too. Personal computers at home were NOT. That's the point.

[AstralStorm]

Interesting but wrong. Almost always kids perused the computers together and shared what they made. This worked exactly like arcades at times.

So not it either. Really my guess is that at some point games started being made for boys only. You saw a lot of war and fighting, racing style games, with much less else. Even platformers started to wear those trappings.

Further, early games were always competitive. That does not generally appeal to people with less testosterone.

There were exceptions, but the rule is as it is.

[Martin_Silenus]

> Almost always kids perused the computers together and shared what they made.

It is an assumption based on what is visible.

> There were exceptions, but the rule is as it is.

There are always exceptions, but this rule is yours.

[defrost]

> Personal computers at home were NOT.

Subjective. I'm still in touch with a wide circle of both genders who had PC's at home back when we collaborated on projects together.

eg: one of these authors: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/geometric-mechanics-...

had a father who sold early Apple & IBM home computers, much fun was had by my circle building transputer array's and other such things in back sheds.