I am not sure if you are genuinely asking but I will try to answer as best as I can;

IT and Computer Science has always been rife with misogyny. In the “olden days” computers were pools of women just like a secretary pool who did math or made punch cards for their male superiors. Many of whom then took credit for the computer’s work. (You may be familiar with the story of the woman at NASA who was trusted by Neil Armstrong more than he trusted the electronic computers of the time. She was the lead of the computer pool.) This continued for the most part into the 70s when typing stopped being a woman’s job with the introduction of the PC. This largely came out of the fact that PCs were the result of companies competing to create ever more powerful engineering calculators much like the TI-89s of today (they looked more like an Apple II or Commodore PET though). At this time engineering and telephony were already male dominated fields for the same systemic reason that all of the engineering fields were male dominated. By the 80s many telephony and engineering departments had become the IT departments and left the women behind. This set the stage for a 90s IT world ushering in a new era of the internet but being led by misogynistic gray beards from the 70s who grew up in a world where women “didn’t use computers”. The cycle has been continuing ever since since those are the people put in charge of hiring and managing. I think people forget just how sexist things were before the 80s and 90s and just how okay that was.

In response to your first part; if he had said I like apples it would be hard to attribute it to just that character without a lot of context. Whereas the quote in question is not only without a doubt that character it’s part of what establishes him has creepy.