The history of practical computing is really labour intensive. The mass of the work has been done in counting paychecks of megacorps, census, taxes, and weather simulations. Unfortunately I have no statistics that would say that women did most of the jobs there but based on historical precedence it sounds plausible to me.<p>Programming as a field has historically two or three subcultures - the corporate, the academic (and finally, the personal).<p>The academic branch is where the new stuff has been imagined. The corporate branch is where the work that added value to society in form of financial income happened. Think of huge accounting machines, and extrapolate from that to modern computing. Taxes, census etc.<p>The corporate branch had several tasks that were labour intensive. Usually this labour intensive part was reserved for women (they are more keen on details <i>on average</i> or other such rationalization). Also, historically, women did not get paid as much as men so more labour for the same amount of money...<p>Well, anyway, the first <i>computers</i> were women (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Human_computer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Human_computer</a>).<p>Women were also extensively hired as data entry clerks.<p>In the age of the mainframe, a typical division of labour was that the <i>software designer</i> wrote the program on paper with pencil, and then the data entry clerk encoded it into the computer (using punch cards or later terminals).<p>The integrated software designer &#x2F; data entry thing probably originated in the universities and other research setings (i.e. Knuth typing his Tex from his notebook the the terminal at his Uni. and so on).