I'm of the impression that back in 1959 when COBOL was released, with a team of 7 designers with 3 women on it, based off the groundwork laid by Grace Hopper, that the technical skill required to be a programmer was actually much higher, and that the women involved in coding were making very technical decisions about that field.

Back then programming was basically applied mathematics, a field with many women. Today programming is gluing together components in order to build systems which is much more similar to engineering, a field with few women.

There are still many women among those who program mathematics (statisticians etc), just that they are usually not called programmers. Also there is much less demand for people who can program math than people who can glue together libraries and create crud apps, so even if all math programmers are included in the statistics they would get dwarfed by the app programmers.

Source of the combination mathematics and statistics being a gender balanced field, above 40% women: https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2017/nsf17310/digest/fod-wome...

Engineering always being male dominated, around 15% women: https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2017/nsf17310/digest/fod-wome...

Computer science gender balance getting lowered to engineering levels: https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2017/nsf17310/digest/fod-wome...

Yeah, I'm of the impression that the intellect required to do software now is much lower - no need to understand bits and bytes or to do math, just sling a bunch of libraries together with glue code from stack over flow and voila a ML system to categorize trouble tickets. Understanding the distinction between the reals and the IEEE double floats is alas long since vanished.

I think the role was called "computer"?