Well yes, there could be such a bias at every stage in the development of an IT career and this would skew the skill/ambition distribution of female engineers t

Well yes, there could be such a bias at every stage in the development of an IT career and this would skew the skill/ambition distribution of female engineers towards the high end. I know plenty of male engineers who, to put it nicely, are underperformers. All of the female engineers I know, and there are much fewer of them, are what I would call exceptional engineers. Because I know so many more male software engineers, I still know more exceptional male engineers than female. However anecdotes don't matter for scientific inference which is why I asked if anyone had such data.