I like how this paper is constructed. They form a bunch of hypotheses and test them and aren&#x27;t afraid to be wrong. Rather refreshing since the typical papers I read are more of the &quot;here&#x27;s our successful test&quot; variety. I feel like a supplementary qualitative analysis (code quality) would be helpful. My personal hypothesis is that women self-select and the pool of female contributes has a higher average skill than the pool of male contributors.<p>I have no evidence to back this up but by gut says that it&#x27;s still socially harder for women to become developers and as a result the ones that &quot;survive&quot; tend to be better on average. While this is a bias I&#x27;d argue that the major reason (cause) for the acceptance&#x2F;rejection of pull requests is the quality of said request which would argue against a bias in the acceptance. I&#x27;m not sure how to phrase it well but in summary I think there&#x27;s a social bias against women in programming (as a career) but I suspect code quality is the main cause of accept&#x2F;reject decisions and there is no bias there.