I've heard anecdotes that prior to the rise of commercial computing and personal computers/game systems which heavily targeted male consumers (In the 60s and 70s, I'd assume?) computer science was considered a "women's field," in the same sense as office management (i.e. the outcome would be a career comparable to that of a secretary).
I haven't been able to find anything other than anecdotes about this, so I'm curious, was this the case, or is this just one of those stories people tell to say "Isn't it wacky how things used to be turned upside down?"
(Note: I realize my phrasing here was rather loaded, I don't mean to imply that any profession ought to be dominated by one gender or another. Everyone ought to be encouraged to pursue their dreams and utilize their skills, and all fields should strive to welcome new voices)
There was a recent Planet Money piece on NPR that's relevant called "When Women Stopped Coding". The decline is, however, a phenomenon of the '80s, not the '60s and '70s.
Some relevant bits:
The share of women in computer science started falling at roughly the same moment when personal computers started showing up in U.S. homes in significant numbers.
And
In the 1990s, researcher Jane Margolis interviewed hundreds of computer science students at Carnegie Mellon University, which had one of the top programs in the country. She found that families were much more likely to buy computers for boys than for girls — even when their girls were really interested in computers.
This was a big deal when those kids got to college. As personal computers became more common, computer science professors increasingly assumed that their students had grown up playing with computers at home.
"Computing" and what it entailed changed definitions over the years, which makes questions around the field a bit more complex than a simple change in demographics. Previous to the advent of the ENIAC, most of these types of calculations were done by humans in assembly-line fashion, and in most accounts, this work was delegated to women, at least during the WWII era where it is typically contrasted against the new digital technology.
When the first machines appeared, the actual task of programming was still labor-intensive, requiring feeding punchcards, wiring cables, etc. This work was also delegated to women. However, this role also created the conditions for women to be the first professional programmers, since someone who directly operates the machine naturally ends up with specialized knowledge about how to run it effectively.
This early experience created some momentum and some notable figures(e.g. Grace Hopper), but it's entangled with a different question which still grabs headlines and has less consensus: the mystery of why women's enrollment in CS courses peaked and then declined in the mid-1980's(which I will not attempt to answer here). That is, the demographic picture is that the women in CS were increasing from a relatively lower rate up until that peak, but they've not crossed the 50% line in most countries as of the early 2000's. Computer science as an formal academic field, therefore, can confidently be said to be male-dominated throughout its history, while computer programming and the broader usage and study of computers had a somewhat more balanced picture in certain times and places.
Some cites to fill out the details of the data and the story around early computing:
Encouraging Women in Computer Science