There may be a little bit of a selection bias going on - as you described - but it is worth remembering that back in the 50s and possibly 60s system administrators did used to be quite a female dominated role because they used to manage the cypher machines during the second world war while the men went off to fight and thus that trend of seeing women in server rooms continued a little while after.

Sadly the designing and building those machines were still male dominated - the female role was more administrative than what we now think of as a "sysadmin".

As for what caused the shift to become so male dominated. I couldn't say for sure. I have a few theories but I wont share them as they're largely speculative.

They might well have been keypunch staff back in those days a lot of code was written long hand and send of to the punchroom to be keyed in.

Ahh yes, I'd forgotten about them. We had a team of 4 or 5 keypunchers at one of the of the companies I worked for near the start of my career.

And muuch of the time, men would work in more phisical jobs like factories, and construction, that where booming in this days, and where well paid jobs.

What happened to the women in tech is that the clerical jobs were all replaced by computers.

I'm still not clear how office work has improved by me not having a secretary. The two hours a day I waste on email, meeting planning etc would pay someone a comfortable wage and mean I don't have to be bothered all the time by emails that I probably don't need to answer, unless it's from those two people.

In my current gig we have an actual full time office manager and it's fucking amazing.

The women who used to be secretaries (some subset of them, at least) are now lawyers, doctors, investors, managers, engineers, etc.

That's always been the point of eliminating jobs: it frees up the people who used to do those jobs to do other things.

The jobs created in the last 20 years have been worse paid and less secure than the jobs that were destroyed. The granddaughters of the 60s secretaries are baristas, nurses, cleaners, retail workers and other jobs with terrible working conditions and security.

That's the problem of the current system, losing jobs is fine as long as they are replaced by better jobs. When they are replaced by worse jobs you have a broken system. And we have a very broken system.

Ironically it doesn't free up the people who used to do them to go about doing what they want with their time - it only frees them up in the same way that the computer will free up memory, the people are able to be allocated to other places in the economy. The observation that automation tends not to free people in any genuine sense even runs against Keynes' predictions for how much we'd be working today.

UK, non-government public sector, very senior people still have secretaries - often described as personal assistants. The PAs handle interfacing and information flow, the senior people can get on with the thinking.

That sounds exactly like a secretary.

> I'm still not clear how office work has improved by me not having a secretary

The problem is the "improvement" is a financial one for the company rather than a workflow improvement at the employee level.

when people talk about "women in tech" they usually don't mean secretaries but women doing mathematics, engineering and programming.

PS: The best secretary I ever had was male; some of the smartest CS-folks I know are women.

Home computers and male nerds suddenly having an advantage when they start at Uni is what happened.