&gt; Programming was originally an exclusively female profession because it was seen as lowly-paid &quot;women&#x27;s work&quot;. Later it became a male profession.<p>I just glanced at Wikipedia on this topic ... and, apart from the convenient mention of Ada Lovelace at the very beginning of both the articles[1] (makes you curious why they do this), history of programming is evidently a mostly -- no, nearly all -- male profession.<p>Just what kind of &quot;programming&quot; was it that the <i>exclusively</i> female professional partook on, whose profession was to later become a male profession (and what kind of &quot;programming&quot; are the male professionals partaking on)?<p>&gt; There were few teenage girls programming at home because the means of doing so - home computers - were marketed almost exclusively to boys. Alas, parents seem to avoid buying boys &#x27;girl toys&#x27; and vice-versa.<p>- Marketers will target whatever that can be easily influenced to make a purchase.<p>- &#x27;girl toys&#x27; are neither superior nor inferior to &#x27;boy toys,&#x27; ... and feminists are the last group of people to acknowledge this distinction. As a generalization, girls learn to manipulate people from a early age (hence playing with barbies)[2], much as boys learn to manipulate tools. Toys merely fulfill this instinctual desire of humans; they are not being enforced by the hypothetical patriarchal parents and society.<p>- Thus, it seems far more likely that despite parents&#x27;&#x2F;peers&#x27; encouragement to play more with the tools (such as computers) &quot;teenage girls&quot; continued to opt to play with &quot;girl toys&quot; out of their own instinctual preference. Perhaps because they knew deep down that the real power lies in manipulating people and not computers.<p>[1] Two links:<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;History_of_programming_languages" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;History_of_programming_languag...</a><p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;History_of_computer_science" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;History_of_computer_science</a><p>[2] Diana Davidson describing this in detail: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;mk_WaTdhyT0?t=1m16s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;mk_WaTdhyT0?t=1m16s</a>