There's no lowering of the bar in the sense of denying hires/promotions, but I think it's fair to say that there are still significant disincentives to female p

There's no lowering of the bar in the sense of denying hires/promotions, but I think it's fair to say that there are still significant disincentives to female participation. Also, I know this is heresy, but GitHub is not necessarily representative of software engineering in general. It emphasizes pure code development over ops or design, it emphasizes a very particular style of open source, it's skewed toward certain project types and sizes, etc. How many of those "male" commits were women hiding their gender, or senior males acting as the upstream conduit for an entire mixed team working against a repo elsewhere? Competitive coding contests probably skew even more heavily male, for reasons that I should hope are obvious. It's a data point, and I thank you for that, but it's not exactly a complete refutation of contrary findings by others. It's also kind of beside the point in exactly the same way as the OP.