I want to take issue with the "remarkably." When I was a kid in the '50s, when to a first approximation all the programmers worked for IBM, they had a hard time hiring people, and so they took to standing on street corners grabbing passers-by, giving them an aptitude test, and offering jobs to the ones who passed. And most of the people they hired that way were women, because that's who didn't have jobs in the postwar years, as the job market was flooded by returning male soldiers.
By the time I knew about computers, in the '60s, those days were over, and programmers were mostly men.
Countess Lovelace is important in the history of computing because, while Babbage was thinking of his proposed computer in terms of numerical problems such as computing tables of logarithms, she made the huge intellectual leap to understanding that all kinds of information could be represented numerically, "digitally" as we say today, and that therefore Babbage's machine could be used for symbolic computation such as the processing of text, audio, and images. Of course Babbage couldn't actually build his machine. (His budget ran out, with which I can empathize, but also, his mechanical design demanded mechanical engineering beyond the ability of his time, such as precision in the manufacture of gears.) And so Lovelace's work wasn't generally known by the time we had actual computers, and so it had to be reinvented.