The hequal article is pretty bad, and at least as biased as the BBC one, but they are at least right in their conclusion. I haven't ready the study itself, so

The hequal article is pretty bad, and at least as biased as the BBC one, but they are at least right in their conclusion. I haven't ready the study itself, so it might be the BBC that misunderstands things: 1. Using "pull request acceptance rate" as a proxy for "code quality" is highly dubious. It might equally well indicate that their PRs are more relevant, smaller and hence easier to review, more basic or any number of things. Since we are looking at a ratio, the gap could also be in the numerator. Maybe men are just more likely to submit PRs, for a given skill level. Many people claim that female developers are being put down by their peers, so it would be natural if they are more hesitant to file a PR, only doing so when they are certain it's good. Etc. 2. The findings are based on a subset of total pull requests, namely those with users whose gender can be identified one way or another. Clearly the slight gender gap could just as well lie here, for example "skilled female developers are more likely than unskilled ones to be show their gender on Google+, compared to the ratio for men". Also, since there is such an enormous difference between the absolute number of male and female developers (probably at least an order of magnitude), it's quite surprising that the gap here is only a couple of percentage points. Given that difference, it's easy to imagine lots of potential reasons for the small bias.