> And the rate of growth really climbed after the middle of the 20th century, when the expansion of basic education became a global priority. You can read more about the expansion of education systems around the world in our entry on Financing Education.
(links to https://ourworldindata.org/financing-education#historical-pe...)
I don't know if that is proof of the statement or anything, but I don't think it's a particularly controversial claim to say that universal education impacts literacy.
As for the challenges women face as they try to enter industry, those are well established and real, for sure. They need to be fought viciously, and we are correct to spend a lot of time and money on those problems. I'd never deny that, it's extremely important to do that work and fight that fight, as this entire article and discussion proves.
But pre-industry, only 18% of CS majors are women, so the educational system has to be fixed as well, that's way too big of an early gap to hope it will magically close once the industry gets it's shit together. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.usnews.com/news/data-mine/a... has a good rundown of where the most valuable opportunities are (middle school is a big one) and how they should be addressed - it's not just about access, it's also about making sure that it's provided in a way that engages and targets young girls specifically, and making sure that more women are teaching these classes. Schools are a valuable point of leverage where you can affect preconceived notions about gender roles and career opportunities, and any effective program needs to break down those barriers. That requires a lot of curriculum design (the easy part) and retraining (the hard).
While you're right that plenty of women code, men outnumber them by 4:1 before they even face the challenges of industry. We need to throw everything we can at that, from every angle, and at every step in the pipeline, until we're much closer to 50/50. Educational interventions are straightforward and proven to work with fairly low cost at the early stages, so I can't imagine why we'd want to rule them out as being part of the solution. They're also massively helpful when addressing the racial imbalances, which are arguably even more vulnerable to asymmetric early exposure than the gender imbalance is (though that's a much bigger subject worthy of its own discussion).