Were you there? I was. Computers were marketed to boys and families for whatever reason reinforced this as well. It may not explain everything, but it explains the genesis of the situation.
The article implies that, in the 80s, home computers were considered nothing more than glorified pong machines and girls were never seen in any of the ads, which is simply incorrect.
There are countless ads featuring Commodores, Apples, and Trash 80s displaying spreadsheets, and quite a few with girls at the keyboard.
Is there an exhaustive study of computer marketing from that time? I ask in all seriousness, because two links and hazy memories from NPR isn't very convincing.
I was there. Home computers were a new thing, so the marketing was a little clunky, but print advertisement usually had both boys and girls in them, as did the Atari 2600 commercials. "Bits and Bytes" was one of my favorite TV shows as a kid. In it, the male actor played someone approaching a computer for the first time, and the female actor played the mentor who showed him how to do things with it, including programming.
Edit: uh, something happened with comment parenting, but anyway, yes, not every ad was mono-gendered, but in practice boys monopolized the C64s and TI-99/4As of the world.
It's chicken and egg situation - it was perceived as a "boy thing" so was marketed at boys. The 80's in the US & Canada weren't exactly Saudi Arabia, but toys were as gendered if not more so than they are today. And people marketing computers had no social agenda, they just took the path of least resistance.
It is, on some level, similar to the tragedy of the commons. Everyone made a decision that worked well for them and in the end the net effect was one that had a lot of negative impact.
