It's an interesting insight. When applying to colleges I never considered applying for CS as I (female) had no programming experience whatsoever, and seemed to be surrounded by people (male) who'd been working on computers for years,
( I'll leave speculation on that for another day )
It was only because they forced EE majors to take programming courses that I ended up in the field. I wrote my first "hello world" as an 18 year old freshman, but it never really seemed to matter.
Male here. CS courses were _not accessible_ to those without prior experience, male or female, full stop. That issue was compounded by having to use the IDEs and tooling available to us 10+ years ago. It wasn't until the last year of my business degree I was exposed to the simplicity of .NET/Visual Basic that made programming interesting, fun, and accessible to someone without experience. If only I had that exposure 4 years sooner, I'd have a CS degree today. C'est la vie.
I graduated college 20 years ago; everything I learned in college was new for everyone there (I had prior experience in other languages) and we were approximately 50%-50% male to female. From my former colleagues most males work in IT, most females work in other domains, by choice. It was no pipeline problem at that time, but the results are the same: people tend to do what they like and I don't see here (Eastern Europe) too many females that like CS. We have 80% females in marketing and over 60% in sales, how about forcing some of them to do IT instead?
When I started the "IDE" was vi running on a Solaris mainframe. 'vi' has has never been accused of being user friendly but since this was pre-linux, I'm not sure any of the experienced coders had ever seen either before. In retrospect it was a pretty good equalizer.
( I'll leave speculation on that for another day )
It was only because they forced EE majors to take programming courses that I ended up in the field. I wrote my first "hello world" as an 18 year old freshman, but it never really seemed to matter.