People assume that a "programmer" is male because if he weren't, "woman programmer" would likely have been used. The meaning of a word is determined by its use. If we want "programmer" to include women, we have to use it for women.

My problem with 'women programmers' is it sounds weird and is probably ungrammatical(female is both a noun and an adjective - women is just a noun, and it is used as an adjective in the title), not that they specify the sex of people they are writing about when their sex had a big effect on what they could contribute.

And maybe it would be good if some people who jumped to 'two men programmers' (doesn't that sound weird?) automatically instead read the article and found out they were women?

Ok so your beef is with the grammar, cool. "two programmers who identify as female" there ya go

It goes from grammatically awkward to semantically awkward. I think OP/GP's point is that it's very odd that we go through hoops to avoid the clearest articulation of the point: "two female programmers".

Perhaps we could just say 'two female programmers'