Both facts that, on average, women are less interested in things (and more interested in people) and also women, on average, are less interested in money, have a solid backing in research. They're not factually wrong.
The field of software business changed rapidly in the 80s. It shifted from a fairly boring and low-paying thing, into an unpleasant and high-pressure field where fortunes were made, even for regular employees (the stock options lottery). Salaries also went way up. It was only natural that men became much more interested in it at that point, and women's interest waned (they're far less inclined to kill themselves in a pointless job to get that $500k salary).
That's also not true regarding the history of the software field. The explosion in engineer salaries is relatively recent. It was only post-2000s when it became a very lucrative field for engineers and by that point the percentage of women developers had dropped off. This was due to both companies shifting hiring strategies to focus specifically on hiring men as well a shift in advertising for home computers and deriding women.
Can you point me to your sources on companies shifting hiring strategies to focus specifically on hiring men? It's the first time I'm hearing about this.
In the '60s the common way programmers were interviewed were through aptitude tests. The standard at the time was the IBM Programmer Aptitude Test, but in the 70s and 80s that shifted to a new personality profile that inherently favored men [1] [2] [3] by Cannon and Perry. This became the new institutional standard and was used to determine who was a 'viable' programmer or not. This is where the traditional 'programmers are anti-social and hate people' thing came from and took root. In turn, advertising became male-focused, men were given more opportunity to become programmers and that's how the industry shifted. There's a bunch of very blatant advertising in the late-70s and early-80s that shows how this shifted.
Interesting. If that was truly the case and was widespread in the 80s, it died with the eighties, as in the late nineties companies came back to truly meritorous hiring that doesn't care about personality (i.e. whiteboarding/leetcoding people to death, or doing weird pseudo-IQ question such as "how many gas stations are there in Manhattan"). Why couldn't women come back in then? The argument that they couldn't, because the field was stereotypically dominated by men by then is not convincing, because the reverse wasn't true (i.e. men moved into women dominated IT in the 80s without a problem, against the field stereotypes that it's for women).
It's because the stereotype changed, like I said. The new gold standard had the average programmer be 'male, nerdy, antisocial' and that was reflected by the rise of home computing being an almost exclusively young boy thing. The stereotype shifted in the 80s to computing being an activity for men, rates of women whom were computer science majors plummeted and it hasn't quite recovered. It hasn't quite died out because people still perpetuate the stereotype that the 1960s research study created.
You can see here in the chart that women were nearing 40% of all computer science majors in the mid-80s, followed by a sharp drop-off into below 20% today [1]. There's about a 15ish year lag period for changes in hiring, perception and stereotypes to catch up as people graduate, join the work force and cycle out.
The field of software business changed rapidly in the 80s. It shifted from a fairly boring and low-paying thing, into an unpleasant and high-pressure field where fortunes were made, even for regular employees (the stock options lottery). Salaries also went way up. It was only natural that men became much more interested in it at that point, and women's interest waned (they're far less inclined to kill themselves in a pointless job to get that $500k salary).