you're pretty much on the money: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...
The reasons speculated are much more boring, though. The personal computer was treated no differently than a Nintendo console, AKA a toy. So they (big coporate) simply decided boys were easier to market the home PC to (remember, this was decades before the general public took games seriously. People legitmately thought video games were a fad to die out of)
And that stuck. Snowballs into a time where the "nerd" stereotype more or less became the perogative term in the 80's/90's as a quick framing for some undesirable male. Every single piece of media had some stereotype of it, well into the 00's. It's not surprising women were put off. Men were put off too.
No particular mastermind here. Just corporate wanting to make a quick buck off of kids. Those kids just happened to pioneer an entire industry while Hollywood laughed at them.