• merc@sh.itjust.works
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    4 hours ago

    No, I don’t think so. It’s true that many of the earliest programmers were female, but there were very few of them, and that was a long time ago.

    In a way, Ada Lovelace was the first programmer, but she never even touched a computer. The first programmers who did anything similar to today’s programming were from Grace Hopper’s era in the 1950s.

    In the late 1960s there were a lot of women working in computer programming relative to the size of the field, but the field was still tiny, only tens of thousands globally. By the 1970s it was already a majority male profession so the number of women was already down to only about 22.5%.

    That means that for 50 years, a time when the number of programmers increased by orders of magnitude, the programmers were mostly male.