I didn't check this data and you didn't provide a link, so can't comment on that, but do you honestly believe that women's position in 70s-80s were better than it is now? I seriously doubt that, just ask your mother or other older women for their opinion.
This is the link I put up earlier. It is tracking women's enrollment in majors lined up with different fields. It shows the percentage of women enrolled in majors for programming tracking along with people enrolled in medicine, law, and the hard sciences until the 1980s where suddenly it deviated rather significantly.