>The best reason I can come up with is Nintendo->PlayStation/Xbox->Steam, but I have no proof.

Eh, the ability (or favour) of playing games doesn't equate to skill in the computing field, which is also what the article inferred. I think that the idea was to have entrants into university who already had exposure to early-level technology (e.g.: phreaking or hacking or debugging, as the old definitions apply). Universities could, in theory, save money by expending less on entry-level classes, which didn't proffer the same opportunity to those whom weren't previously exposed to the field.

From a capitalist perspective, that idea makes sense: Increase profit margins by the supply/demands of the market; if you have more candidates with exposure, of course it's more encumbant for anyone not exposed to the field to even try - you tailor for those already exposed and save tons of cash.

Where the delineation occurs is between the previous workforce (pre-80's) and the up and coming workforce (80's and later). The finger-pointing seems to infer that it all boils-down to boys having the better opportunity because they were more-so exposed to computers/technology than girls; however, the same families that were buying computers and putting them in boys' rooms would've had women that previously worked in the computing field, yeah? So, then, the inference comes of "who made these specific decisons?" and that's where we start losing insight. To say that fathers had sole power in the family dynamics during the 80's is to discredit the entire reality that divorces saw an exponential increase in the 70's[1]. So, it would be a falsehood to presume that men are solely responsible for shouldering the blame during this time.

Even worse, because we lose sight of the why, I fear that we're far more susceptible to repeating the same pattern[s] because we don't know what to look-out for - if that makes sense?

>And my thought is maybe women "snuck in" during that interim period.

Eh, I think it isn't as nefarious as we're inclined to believe that it is. Given the time period[s], the saturation of women in all fields was bore out of want (and possibly some necessity): Conscription during war-times means a vaccuum in the work-force and, without steady income from the "bread-winners", women not only chose to enter the workforce, it was considered a civic duty to contribute to the war-effort[s] (see: Rosy the Riveter[0] as an example).

During the solid-state era, I'll call it, women bore the shoulder of the brain and physical work in the computing field. When it became more wet-ware (plug-n-play), that's when we started to see the decrease. If that's correlatable to other reasons, we might find the culprit there? I'm not sure.

However, we also need to include other considerations: Women who were working in the 50's, if they worked the predominance of their time in one company, likely saw retirement in the 70's and 80's, yeah? So, during that time, there should've been a noticable lack of available women in the workforce - if women entering the chosen education fields decreased before then. Yet, from the study perspectives, the predominance of those seems to be purely related to women entering the chosen fields in education, yeah?

So, if the available market has more demand than supply, then entry via experience (which is how - I believe - we got to the "experience in lieu of education" aspect) make sense as to the rationale of why the became dominated by boys/men; yet, we come full-circle back to asking, "Why did they have those opportunites more, in the first place, if the previous workforce saw more women than men in that field? Was there some underlying reason why daughters and granddaughters didn't want to be like their mothers or grandmothers? Was there some foreshadowed type of warning about not working in that field?"

We're addressing the effect, which is great, but we still don't understand the cause. The article seems to boil-it down to sexism in the workplace but the question it doesn't answer is: "Did that sexism exist before?" If so, then it would make sense that older generations would warn and ward-off younger generations from entering the field. If not, then there's something amiss.

If the sexism did not exist, before, then we should also investigate the why it came about after the decline, in the first place. Was it akin to the Irish disliking the American-Irish for their abandonment during the Great Famine? If so, then did that morph - much the same way as the hate for the American-Irish, when they call themselves Irish today - because it became the modus operandi for the general work-force over time? These are painfully complicated social questions, I'm aware, but I think that they need to be asked, so that we can understand the picture - fully - to prevent it from happening ever again.

If the failure was entirely due to multiple aspects of society, all at once, then addressing one or two isn't going to prevent it from recurring and that should be our ultimate goal - for everyone, yeah?

(Sorry for the diatribe.)

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosie_the_Riveter
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/jan/28/divorc...