Luckham's introductory remark that all the programmers were men contrasts with the situation 10 years before, when most of the programmers were women. Women got shoved aside when it became apparent that programming was an honorable and challenging engineering profession, not mere routine translation of conceptual designd into machine language. It took almost 10 more years for the Labs to recognize that women programmers were engineers, too. 

Yet de jure recognition of women programmers has not yet become de facto. Here at Dartmouth, as at many schools, women form a far smaller fraction of computer science than they do of the engineering school. In engineering the proportion of women reflects that in the general population.