Comment Re:No mystery - suddenly there was money in it (Score 2) 608
Wrong.
Did you read the fucking article? The female enrollment in CS never changed, what happened is that male interest skyrocketed.
Why? What happened is that the personal computing market had finally reached a good enough saturation point in the previous 8-9 years since the introduction of the Altair. Suddenly, there were young men, many of whom had been social outcasts, who had been programming since their teenage yeas on their parent's computers. These self-taught programmers could run circles around the college CS graduates of the time who had only been programming for 4 years, usually on outdated mainframes. This new crop of programmers had practical experience already with the consumer market devices of the time and could hit the ground running.
To this day, you won't see most teenage girls sitting quietly and learning how to program to get a leg up above the rest. They're too busy popping birth control and twerking to MTV. Speaking of which, MTV launched in 1981 and became mainstream in 1984. Maybe that should be the target of your angst.