Because of the industry’s active refusal to promote the women to more senior roles, by the time the card puncher and machine operator became redundant as the technology evolved, the amount of women in computing plummeted. But the irony is, one of the biggest issues plaguing the British computing industry at the time was a labor shortage – and its continued ignorance of its female talent (its biggest reserve of computing experience) meant it was its own worst enemy. Even a government report from the time accepted that…