2) An explanation of this needs to account for a great and rapid shift in favor of women, as far as proportion-of-practitioners, that was happening at exactly the same time as the opposite shift in programming, in both law and medicine.
I don’t know what the actual reason is but “it got prestigious so women got pushed out” makes no sense to me, based on the timeline of events in full context. It was very much not prestigious in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, certainly far less so than law and medicine at that time (still isn’t as prestigious as those, outside tech circles—you can see it in people’s faces. It’s high-paid but lower-“class” than those, to this day)
The traditional way I heard it wasn’t that it was about prestige, but rather that programming became engineering-coded rather than humanities-coded. And misogyny did play a role there, one of the Turing movies had a great story line about it, although I can’t remember the name off hand.
Related, I think math went through a similar transition.
It completely neglects the actual history of the field of computing, even just the 20th century, where the field was filled with women.
Something interesting that I think a lot of younger people don't appreciate: back in the day, unless your name was Hemingway, it was considered unmanly to touch a keyboard. Anything that involved a typewriter or anything else with a keyboard was distaff by definition, just so much secretarial work. Maybe a journalist's job, if you were feeling generous.
Sounds stupid as hell, and it was, but that's a big reason why women played an outsized part in the growth of computing. First as the 'calculators' in WWII, then as Baudot terminals started to take over, as keyboard operators.
Don't make the mistake of assuming they were all Grace Hoppers or Margaret Hamiltons or Adele Goldbergs, because that simply wasn't the case. Many of them might have been, though, in a less stereotype-driven world.
It completely neglects the actual history of the field of computing, even just the 20th century, where the field was filled with women.
It’s only once it became a prestigious field that women suddenly developed a “biological” inclination against it.