Men would have insisted we stay with Assembly.
Well, I was pretty good at assembler for a lot of different computers. I liked it! It did seem like I was forced to write stuff in FORTRAN. I stayed way clear of COBOL.
I liked 'c' from the start, and still use it now. I still write software at the borderline between hardware and software. The youngsters don't even know what to make of a register. XML my ass!
They did! Sort of. They criticized Fortran for generating inefficient code. A common practice was to get an object deck of a compiled program and then patch it for a while with object changes rather than recompiling THE WHOLE THING.
I was in college in this era, and I learned by experiment that the IBM Assembler was actually a pig, and would take four or five times ( or more ? ) to assemble the same object as generated by FORTRAN. Of course, it had an excuse, since it was more general.
I think programming was dominated by men in that era, but there were a lot of women in it, too. My mom was an ace programmer, in fact. There were "keypunch girls", like typing pools, and some of them would bootstrap their way up.