Lisp wasn't so bad, APL was a health hazard.
It's my contention that the IT industry's obsession with programming languages is a major factor that has led to a significant reduction in the number of women in the business. I was taught to program in Autocoder in the early 1960's by a woman, and during the 60's and 70's most of my bosses were women - in technical, real time and commercial systems. And up until the mid-late 1980's, 30-40% of the graduates I employed were women, but then they just disappeared - initially in places like Singapore and India and then UK, Australia etc. After the wall came down I hired some Russian IT people, about half were women - that would have been in the early '90s. Shortly after that I too
got fed up with IT, so I changed tack.
Another factor that has driven women out of IT (by their own confession to me) is the over-emphasis on presentation - particularly in the past twenty years. It used to be - do you know the difference between CICS and Tuxedo, now it's
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BR