"but now men such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg—the modern trinity of the tech world—are hailed as the innovative programmers of the last 30 years."

Not a confidence builder. I do not doubt that Gates and Zuckerberg have done serious programming, and that some of what Gates did was definitely innovative. I do doubt that they made their fortunes as "the" innovative programmers.

It's actually not clear from the data whether women left coding, or did men just enter the field at a higher rate them women as the field grew? Maybe coding was a more attractive path for a single lonely nerdy guy who was too shy to ask a girl out. Of course as more lonely nerdy guys entered the field and that culture came to dominate, I'm sure that made it less and less attractive to women. But again, the author hasn't shown data to make the case that women were leaving the field.

Your hypothesis at least lines up with the big points in the data.

Computer science enrollment went through a huge boom and bust centered on 1984-1985. In a five year timespan the number of computer science majors increased by five times, before falling back to approximately half the peak.

The second big increase in computer science graduates was in 2005.

These both correspond with the major drops in the percentage by gender chart.

Points to you if you make a graph for us of the absolute historical Computer Science graduation rate by gender.

During World War II, a "computer" was a job title for someone who programmed the first general-purpose electronic computer, commissioned by the Ballistics Research Laboratory of the U.S. Army. It is interesting. I did not know that was a job title.

Besides, the stereotype is serious. A lot of females are not willing to study programming or computer science just because the imaged built by the media. In some engineering school, the ratio of Male to Female is 9:1!