1) Legacy of the word 'computer' being a job title of lots of women sitting at long tables together with slide rules. Men would give orders and they would compute.
2) Designing the machines was originally the high-prestige job. "Just" programming wasn't considered difficult until we actually tried doing it a lot.
I think the stuff about public perception was more about marketing PCs in the 70s and 80s than any illuminati-level labor market manipulation.
But again. Just because there were women doing a job that is very different than today's or the last 40 years of programming and now there is not does not indicate that there was actual discrimination that caused woman to leave the industry.
1) Thr job changed dramatically. 2) Aftet the war we had the baby boomers. Women were off making a ton of babies not programming. 3) The entire job market changed for both men and woman away from manufacturing to white collar jobs. This opening the doors for both men and women to have jobs else where.
This is a new one. I know you already said you can't find your source, but if anyone else has one, I would love to see it.
That said, I do agree with you that lowering the bar is the wrong way to go about things, and that outreach programs will be more beneficial. I saw the negative effects of lowering the bar first hand in the military. Physical fitness tests have lower standards for females, but they both compete for the same promotion spots. This led to a lot of females with higher fitness scores than males, and and subsequent faster promotions and resentment from the males. A lot of the females didn't like the lower standards either, because they knew that once they got to a higher rank their subordinates would just assume they only got that high of a rank because they had to meet lower standards and that allowed them to get promoted faster than their peers.