Yeah, there’s a similar issue from the other side (at least in my country) - Men will usually apply for a job if they don’t meet all the requirements, while women won’t tend to do so.
Going on a tangent off “The traits that people typically associate with success in leadership, such as assertiveness and strength" (from the article), that almost sounds like something form the 50s - “Look here Johnson, I need those forms, and I need them yesterday, now get moving!”. Traits I associate with leadership (at least in high-skill modern work place) are good communication and motivation skills, ability to plan ahead and multi-tasking/ability to prioritize. Sure, once in a while a manager has to bang their fist against the table, but the real skill isn’t in banging on the table as hard as you can, it’s the ability get what you want without needing to do so in the first place. Point being that, if anything, women are better managers.
Telegraph and wire transfers were a thing 100 years ago, you could say “Everyone have a telegraph at home. Private communication, for example orders to your bank to wire money, uses codes/cyphers that can be decoded if the third party was smart enough”.
You’d have to go back before the discovery of electricity, and even then you could make an analogy with lighthouses (which isn’t really a stretch, as fiber optic cables can be described as point-to-point light houses), and most people at most periods are probably familiar with the idea of talking in codes.
Technology isn’t really that hard to explain. Social change is much harder. Try explaining to someone from 1920 that the US had a black president and nothing catastrophical happened, or that all professions today are open to women and you’d have a much harder time.