Comment by taneq

My mum (who started programming mainframes in assembler at 17, was a very early adopter of PL/1 and was expert enough that IBM purchased her annotated copy of one of their manuals for quite a sum of money back in the 70s) says many of the earliest programmers were women because programming was viewed as secretarial work. It only became more male-dominated after it started being prestigious and highly paid.