I think we have a winner. Most likely difference - corporate vs non-corporate contributors.<p>The paper&#x27;s conclusion that &quot;women are more competent overall&quot; doesn&#x27;t seem very plausible to me. If there was really a significant, consistent boost simply from being female then we&#x27;d see software companies that consist mostly of women or which are run by women outcompete opposite companies at least some of the time, and it&#x27;d be an effect that&#x27;d have been detected before. I&#x27;m struggling to think of any examples of this.<p>Based on my own experience of github and open source, however, the only times I have <i>ever</i> seen women contribute to open source, they were <i>always</i> being paid to do so. I cannot recall a single time that I came across a pull request or even just a regular patch from a hobbyist woman. Not sure why that is, but it has been a constant throughout my career - men do hobby programming and women don&#x27;t.<p>Given this difference I&#x27;d expect contributions from women to be larger overall, tackling grunge work that volunteers wouldn&#x27;t want to do, solves some real business problem, and more frequently be code that was tested for a while internally first so is less likely to have quality problems.<p>The fact that men are also less likely to have pull reqs accepted when their gender is known also seems likely to be a correlation with submitting from personal gmail accounts vs corporate accounts.