The first programmers (in a certain sense, wiring the first calculation machines in certain ways to achieve certain results) in fact were women, but something badly changed since then.
You are somewhat misrepresenting what the original job of "programmers" was. The programmer's job was to translate algorithms written in a higher level language (flow charts) into machine code. The people writing flow charts were predominantly men and went by the title "Systems Engineer".
Men were the first programmers, under the modern definition of the term. Women were the first compilers.
The major change since then is that compiling high level code to machine code is now done by a computer program rather than a person. That's not a shame of our society, that's a triumph of computer science.
What you've outlined makes it sound like men were the first software architects, but women were still programmers. Translating a software design into code is definitely still programming, don't you think?
Writing flow charts is not software architecture, it's just programming in a high level language. Software architecture, as the title is now used, simply did not exist in that era. Programs were not complex enough for it to be relevant.
The systems engineers were doing the job we now associate with programming: turning business/scientific problems into flow charts/other high level representations of algorithms which generate the solution. The programmers were merely doing the work of LabVIEW ( http://www.ni.com/labview/whatsnew/ ) by hand.
LabView is a code generation tool that replaces the work a programmer would have to do. Rational Rose has a tool that spits out Java code, but that doesn't mean there are no Java programmers.
I'm not sure why you're trying to downplay the work these women did, but it's clear from the ENIAC histories and their biographies that they were far, far more than transcriptionists or "compilers". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Holberton
You are somewhat misrepresenting what the original job of "programmers" was. The programmer's job was to translate algorithms written in a higher level language (flow charts) into machine code. The people writing flow charts were predominantly men and went by the title "Systems Engineer".
Men were the first programmers, under the modern definition of the term. Women were the first compilers.
The major change since then is that compiling high level code to machine code is now done by a computer program rather than a person. That's not a shame of our society, that's a triumph of computer science.