fwiw there are a few people who dip their toes in at that point, and sometimes it works. In fact in my program I think most of the women in the field got in that way (especially because the department was heavily advertising to women -- and really just to anyone who wasn't already into it). The bigger issue, though, I think is that computer-savviness is such a.. skill ... that it's super hard to get _really_ good at it in a college degree; you need to be heavily computer-literate already to excel.

Not as a rule exactly: these days, anyone reasonable savvy person can learn CS well enough to be employed in tech and any math-savvy person can certainly end up in CS research. But it is, I think, _super_ hard to start learning programming in college and actually end up good at _low_-level computing like Kernel/Systems level stuff, which really requires like total immersion in the space, similar to learning a language by living in the country. In my program this meant that the really technical classes were filled with the students who came in already very computer-literate and into programming, and they tended to be 90+% male.