Their method of identifying genders is to use a data source of Github user emails and cross reference those with a Google+ account.  Then they scrape the Google+ account and attempt and try to automatically determine the gender.  Using this method, they are able to identify only 35% of the users involved in these PRs.<p>I find this suspect, because, anecdotally, I can look almost any author of a PR and determine their gender to a high degree of certainty.  Probably well over 90% of the time, just from their name + profile picture + handle.  Try it for yourself..look at the latest commits on a random project and see how obvious the genders are most of the time.<p>So the claim that &quot;when a woman is identifiable, PRs are merged less&quot; is totally suspect, because they themselves can only identify the genders of a small percentage relative to what a normal human can identify.  If people can identify the genders way more often and accurately, then the claim being made is bogus.  Perhaps there is a correlation of strongly signalling your gender (to the point where an inaccurate method of gender-identification has no problem) to being a below average developer.