Like you I was a contractor in the City before going permie.
The non-IT IT women I cited were in media not the City.
We mostly do finance, specfically quant analysts, people wot do hard sums for banks. The work does involve harcore programming as well.
We see occasional women, but their frequency is so low I can't see how we could measure their relative quality, even if we cared.
The City is not family friendly, but very few areas of business are these days. Guess it's worse than the average, but the average is pretty grim.
It's possible that dinosaure's friend may be shall we say embellishing her role at PC Mag. When I was there about 25% of the editorial staff had "editor" somewhere in their job title. (I didn't).
If she did overlap with me, and exists at all, she will do doubt reply that I was fired 3 times by PC Mag which is not quite true, that I was thrown across a bar by Bill Gates PR woman, which is true, and that I don't write anymore which is not only untrue but that I earn more at it than her, but not much.
And yes, I did have a very untidy desk.
It's possible that in the last couple of months of PC Mag's existence as a magazine, a woman was put in charge, though that's even less impressive than my own somewhat tarnished career in that business given that it went from the top mag in the business to extinct very quickly.
I've checked with one of the last rats to leave that ship as it sunk, and he has confirmed that PC Mag never had a woman editor.
If it is who I think it might be ask her if she still doesn't know what Config.sys does ?
Hmm, DC, if you're still pimping, most of the women IT folks you're seeing are in the financial markets? Or do you pimp financials, rather than IT folk?