Reddit reviews Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing (History of Computing)

>Whether these differences are cultural or biological is rather moot when the proposed approach is the alter the field to accommodate them.

You say this as if it's a problem but the fact of the matter is the field was altered to accommodate men so I don't see why it can't make more shifts.

>So it's not so much that women were directly discouraged from entering the field as cultural trends led to a massive uptick in male interest and downtick in female interest.

Nothing in what you've quoted supports the idea that women weren't directly discouraged from entering the fields while there was also a cultural shift. Meanwhile, another historian of the field provides a longer timeline:

>In 1967, despite the optimistic tone of Cosmopolitan’s “Computer Girls” article, the programming profession was already becoming masculinized. Male computer programmers sought to increase the prestige of their field, through creating professional associations, through erecting educational requirements for programming careers, and through discouraging the hiring of women. Increasingly, computer industry ad campaigns linked women staffers to human error and inefficiency.

---

>Provide some evidence to support this idea. These are claims I hear made frequently but are never backed up with any sort of sources. Show which associations did what to discourage hiring of women. Provide examples of these ads that disparage women staffers. Explain where such math and personality tests were used and how they were biased against women.

There are whole books on the subject. Here's one.

Here's another.

Here's another about the UK.

The information you seek is in those books which I don't have readily available to me, otherwise I'd quote them for you.

> our beloved meritocracy

It's not a meritocracy. It never has been. Re: Programmed Inequality.