Back in the 1930s - before computers existed it was considered boring women's work (sexism intended). There wasn't much demand because of course computers were a room full of people running this by hand. In the 1950s when computers were invented males discovered programming was interesting and took over.

As such it is more the image is programming will be women's work than a reality because the reality is there weren't many programmers.

https://www.history.com/news/coding-used-to-be-a-womans-job-... is a bit superficial but gives a decent summary

I don't know of a solid source, but I've heard anecdotally that computer programming and operation roles in major corporations of the '60s and '70s tended to be dominated by women, partly because the kinds of tabulation and collation that big business wanted were extensions of existing secretarial work, but also for the more immediate practical reason that the average female office worker of the time was far more likely than her male colleagues to already be an experienced typist.

“Programmer” used to be the name of a job turning flowcharts into punch cards, because hiring someone to use a keypunch was much cheaper than computer time. They were replaced not by men but by compilers.

“Systems analyst” used to be the name of our job.

Not in direct answer to the question, but as an interesting aside, the conditions of space didn't allow for normal memory implementations in the Apollo missions back in the 60s. An alternative form, called core rope memory [1], used the placement of copper wire along a rope to encode ROM-style instructions into blocks of memory. This memory was literally woven by a team of older ladies for the purposes of use in the guidance systems. Great anecdote from the annals of comp sci history.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_rope_memory

A women (Ada Lovelace) is "often been cited as the first computer programmer" [1]

Also the term "Computer" was actually an occupation (that was dominated by women) before the modern usage [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace#First_computer_pr... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)

Is there any evidence for a grammatically feminine version of “computer?” “Computress?”

Edit: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/computress

I've met many trained by IBM COBOL developers.