Whaaattt?

Pushing the envelope or thinking outside the box seem to have dropped out of fashion for some reason. Probably because they never really meant anything other than someone having a bright idea.

 

It's just lateral thinking which is something women have been doing holisitically for millennia @Philippa so had to have a new name when men started doing it in business and technology.

 

Strangely men couldn't type either till computers came along. And many were allergic to answering phones till mobiles arrived.

 

There was me, as an ignorant man who can still only type with two fingers, thinking that all humans of whatever gender had been doing that sort of thing since evolution chucked them out of the trees. Some apes and birds can do it as well and if we ever learn to speak cetacean we'll probably find dolphins and others have been doing it as well.

 

Indeed it most certainly was! Back before computers and mobiles, stroll into any office building and you would find women typing and answering phones. You would not find any men performing those roles in 99% of workplaces. Then, all of a sudden, when the boredom is taken out of the task, when Tippex and carbon copies become redundant, when requirements for accuracy and good grammar get tossed out the window, and tech becomes exciting and cutting-edge, men suddenly find they do have the genetic capacity to tap at a keyboard. Amazing!

 

Just want to point out that the first computer programmer was a woman - Ada Lovelace who made Babbage's analytical engine work in the 1840s.

After that women were used to compute data for ballistics in the 1st World War, the trajectory of Venus' orbit and in the 2nd World Xar to decode Italian and German code machines.

Then there are the famous women who programmed NASA's new IBM computers when the men couldn't figure it out. Computers - the machines - get their name form the women who performed the complex mathematical calculations that put USA astronauts in space and got them back again using brains, paper and pen and sometimes chalk and blackboard.

Women have been at it for decades but don't get the recognition. No surprise there.
Timeline of women in computing - Wikipedia

 

I have no doubt women do some things better than me, but I also think men do some things better than women.
But we are not allowed to say that anymore, are we

 

Pete, you're not even allowed to say you know the difference between a man and a woman.

 

The word "computer" comes from the Latin verb computare, meaning "to calculate" or "to sum up". Initially, it referred to a person who performed calculations, but by the mid-20th century, the meaning shifted to describe electronic calculating machines.

 

@Obelix-Vendée you should also have mentioned Caroline Herschel, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Rosalind Franklin, Bess of Hardwick, Dame Stephanie Shirley, Grace Hopper, Florence Nightingale Khadija bint Khuwaylid, Elizabeth II, Elizabeth I, Eleanor of Aquitane among millions of others who have contributed over the centuries to the progress of humanity.
Women forget and ignore as many as men do.

 

Intellectually no.

 

Now this is definitely on topic, read and boggle:
Customers sue over 'embarrassing' squeaky On Cloud shoes