Reddit reviews The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise (History of Computing)

Why men took over coding and computers has been well researched. How about Stanford as a source. There have been entire books written about it. There were many factors at play, such as restricting women from being promoted, harrassing women out the industry, marketing aimed solely at men, entirely male management, etc.

I didn't make the comparison to slavery, early suffragettes made the comparison to slavery. Women like Angelina Grimké Weld were important in both the anti-slavery and pro-suffrage movements. There was a big overlap betwen the two in the 19th century, the suffragette movement only became racist in the 1910s when Liberal Progressives (who were often Southern Democrats, not the modern kind) adoped support.

A wife belonged to their husband, a daughter belonged to their father, this was rightly compared with black people being owned by slave masters. Slavery as an institution lasted many centuries without showign signs of ending. As for women's role in society, it wasn't always Victorian Era style views. Women went up and down in power and influenced depending on the region and time. Some places even had matriachal societies. However, in conventional Western counties society is patriachal and has for thousands of years suppresed women. Something being astonishingly bad doesn't make it less true.

The cause behind women being a minority in certain professions is specifically caused by this society. If you are encourged to be a housewife, and discouraged from learning about certain things it's less likely you will build an interest and make a career out of them.

How many exceptions are needed before you accept something? A thousand? A million? If you're using this as a judgement for when something stops being an exception, then that is your definition of progress. In my law school, 50% of students are women, because the legal profession has opened the doors and welcome women soliciters and barristers. There are still problems, sexism still exists, but other industries which have not been welcoming will of course have fewer women going into them.

This is all without mentioning the counter to treating women as housewives. Which is that men are incapable of looking after children, working certain jobs deemed feminine, etc. Which is also abdsurd and foolish.

>Whether these differences are cultural or biological is rather moot when the proposed approach is the alter the field to accommodate them.

You say this as if it's a problem but the fact of the matter is the field was altered to accommodate men so I don't see why it can't make more shifts.

>So it's not so much that women were directly discouraged from entering the field as cultural trends led to a massive uptick in male interest and downtick in female interest.

Nothing in what you've quoted supports the idea that women weren't directly discouraged from entering the fields while there was also a cultural shift. Meanwhile, another historian of the field provides a longer timeline:

>In 1967, despite the optimistic tone of Cosmopolitan’s “Computer Girls” article, the programming profession was already becoming masculinized. Male computer programmers sought to increase the prestige of their field, through creating professional associations, through erecting educational requirements for programming careers, and through discouraging the hiring of women. Increasingly, computer industry ad campaigns linked women staffers to human error and inefficiency.

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>Provide some evidence to support this idea. These are claims I hear made frequently but are never backed up with any sort of sources. Show which associations did what to discourage hiring of women. Provide examples of these ads that disparage women staffers. Explain where such math and personality tests were used and how they were biased against women.

There are whole books on the subject. Here's one.

Here's another.

Here's another about the UK.

The information you seek is in those books which I don't have readily available to me, otherwise I'd quote them for you.