It's not expressed explicitly, but this is clearly implying that the reason men and boys were buying and using computers more than women and girls was because of the marketing.
Let me suggest an alternative explanation: Computers were marketed to men and boys because that was the part of the population that was most interested in the things that computers can do. If you want to sell something, your best prospects are going to be the people that already want that kind of thing.
I don't really buy the explanation. The change happens too early: neither schoolboys nor schoolgirls had their own computers in 1982.
Yes we did
I too think that the article got the timing wrong somehow.
But it was probably computers as (and in) pop culture that turned away many that saw computer science as a career path just as law school and medicine.
In the early 80s the white coat scientists where gone in the media, and replaced by neerdy kids, culminating with the unlikly tale of Bill Gates.
The message was that you had ti be incredibly smart and geeky to be able to work with computers.
The reality is that you probably have to be just a bit over average, but mainly just very stubborn and won't mind spending hours and hours solving very stupid problems...
Edit: One way to get stubborn is to be inherently fascinated by computers and self-controlling systems. At least it works for me....
has a link to an older ACM article on this.
India's domestic market and opportunities are growing, but the monetary value of an education still does depend heavily on access to international labor markets, especially in the US and perhaps Europe.
Law, medicine, nursing, and various other fields may be attractive, but they aren't nearly as open as technology to people who don't have a current right to live and work in the US. Programming isn't locked down by regulatory bodies (which in many ways are cartels backed by government), whereas the US government has gone a step further to open programming and technology to international workers through the creation of specialized visa programs.
Although there is a greater cultural emphasis on STEM education outside the US, my guess that this is still partly a response to the relative difficulty in accessing international labor markets. Studying STEM is more favorable if you're looking outside your borders, whereas law, medicine, whereas the more tightly regulated "professions" are more attractive if you're generally looking inside your borders.
This certainly isn't a groundbreaking sentiment. There were some interesting points in the article, though:
> [a study found that] families were much more likely to buy computers for boys than for girls — even when their girls were really interested in computers
Which caused the men to be far ahead of women where it came down to experience with computers.
I'm not too confident in the accuracy of the aforementioned study, but if the conclusion was correct, then that would certainly point towards the common "social normality pressure" explanation for women being less common in at least CS.
However, it doesn't really apply in present day as almost every family has a computer, and every student entering college now had access to a PC to work on when they were a teenager.