Programming was never pink collar. When women were 'programming' mainframes and big analog computers back in the day, they were just punching in programs that were written by mostly men.
Basically they were doing a rote process like women commonly did with telephone switch boards, but operating on computer signals instead of voice signals.
If a modern day programmer gets carpal tunnel, and they buy a typist so they can just dictate code to the person - no one would consider the typist a programmer unless he or she also happened to have those skills - not simply becaues they type in code.
When my parents were working for GE, the engineers/scientists were men (like my dad), and their assistants who programmed for them were commonly women (like my mom), but they were no more "just typists" than programmers are today. Pay for someone experienced was around $50-60K adjusted for inflation, which I think tells you they weren't the equivalent of Google or Amazon "software engineers", but they were the equivalent of someone making that salary for some random business in flyover country today. Lots of people make that kind of money today doing the work that businesses like Google outsource because it's not exciting enough for their in-house talent that makes six figures.
Well, anecdotally, the reason my mom ended up as a programmer is because she had an admission/scholarship to study engineering in college revoked because she was a woman - they didn't technically exclude women, but they told her they already had one in the department and didn't need any more. So she got a degree in math (this was before computer science was a thing) and ended up working for engineers, taking their problems and turning them into code.
Now I can't say how common this was without statistics, but you can see it paints a picture of how discrimination in one area could potentially affect another in a systematic way.
It could well be (and I'm sure I'm not the first to suggest it) that reduced discrimination in areas that require both technical and soft skills have caused an exodus of women from mere coding, because it's both more lucrative and enjoyable for many of them.
Basically they were doing a rote process like women commonly did with telephone switch boards, but operating on computer signals instead of voice signals.
If a modern day programmer gets carpal tunnel, and they buy a typist so they can just dictate code to the person - no one would consider the typist a programmer unless he or she also happened to have those skills - not simply becaues they type in code.