I agree that his may be part of the difference, but here is my experience. There IS a gender gap, but with it a matching skills/abilities gap. I have experien

I agree that his may be part of the difference, but here is my experience. There IS a gender gap, but with it a matching skills/abilities gap. I have experienced this first hand with dozens of women. A rare couple of them were top notch developers. They were ambitions and had a real passion for development and technology. So did about 20-25% of the men I worked with (vs less than 10% of the women). The other woman and men had base skills, but rarely showed ambition or passion to learn new thing and improve their skills, habits, tools, ETC. They were kind of just grinders. They never excelled or impressed. They weren't the kind who would tinker on the weekends with OSS or read development or tech blogs or books when they had free time. The top notch women were promoted and made similar salaries as the top notch men. Overall though, the women lagged behind the men percentage wise because of the reasons mentioned. I would be curious to know if others have seen this pattern. This is based on my 15 years in the software industry.