from NYT Magazine: The Secret History of Women in Coding (2019). fascinating & infuriating. hit the next person you hear blathering on about meritocracy over the head with this

But if biology were the reason so few women are in coding, it would be impossible to explain why women were so prominent in the early years of programming, when the work could be, if anything, far harder than today. It was an uncharted new field, in which you had to do math in binary and hexadecimal formats, and there were no helpful internet forums, no Google to query, for assistance with your bug