The New York Times Magazine – The Secret History of Women in Coding – Computer programming once had much better gender balance than it does today. What went wrong? by Clive Thompson (adapted from “Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World,” available March 26, 2019): “When digital computers finally became a practical reality in the 1940s, women were … pioneers in writing software for the machines. At the time, men in the computing industry regarded writing code as a secondary, less interesting task. The real glory lay in making the hardware. … If we want to pinpoint a moment when women began to be forced out of programming, we can look at one year: 1984. A decade earlier, a study revealed that the numbers of men and women who expressed an interest in coding as a career were equal. … From 1984 onward, the percentage dropped; by the time 2010 rolled around, … 17.6 percent of the students graduating from computer-science and information-science programs were women. One reason … has to do with a change in how and when kids learned to program. … Once the first generation of personal computers, like the Commodore 64 or the TRS-80, found their way into homes, teenagers were able to play around with them [before entering college] … By the mid-’80s, some college freshmen … were remarkably well prepared. … [T]hese students were mostly men, as two academics discovered when they looked into the reasons women’s enrollment was so low…”