That was not uncommon. I went to school both in the United States and the USSR. Back there, almost always the student at the top of their class was a girl.

I remember that American female students struck me like a bunch of divas at first. That's when I realized these things are purely cultural.

My father worked in one of these Central Calculation Centers in the 80s. Almost all programmers were women. Man tended to work more with the hardware which was considered more "dirty" work since you had to be stuck for hours in those huge machines trying to find the piece that broke. Too bad we lost all our Ada lang, linear programming books...

If I'm not mistaken this was the case across the board

Back then the actual process of programming was considered as a clerk job, wasn't it?

Not back then, even by late eighties USSR, technical occupations were women dominated. By 1990, 68% of union's engineers were women.

Men were supposed to do either dunce jobs, or jobs for "big men" like bossing people around in the party or state enterprises.