Historically it's been quite a pendulum shift, because in the 1960s, programming was considered women's work.
In the 1960s the two big programming languages were COBOL and FORTRAN, the latter used by engineers, scientists, and statisticians for FORmula TRANslation. I doubt that there has ever been gender parity among Fortran programmers -- the Real Programmers
Real Programmers Don't Use PascalWhere does the typical Real Programmer work?
It was largely due to the efforts of thousands of Real Programmers working for NASA that our boys got to the moon and back before the Russkies.
The lead software engineer for Apollo 11, whose team is credited with software heroics that saved a nearly aborted landing, was Margaret Hamilton, a woman.
Enrollment of women in undergraduate degree programs in computer science peaked in the mid-80's at over 40%, and then has since declined by about a factor of 2.
It wasn't just that a woman was the lead software engineer (a term Margaret Hamilton coined, btw, in an effort to gain some well-deserved respect from the hardware folks), but the programming team was woman-dominated.
They wrote it in assembly language. The man who invented FORTRAN did so, he candidly admitted, because he didn't like programming, and coding in assembly was too hard.
