The hequal article is pretty bad, and at least as biased as the BBC one, but they are at least right in their conclusion.
I haven't ready the study itself, so it might be the BBC that misunderstands things:
1. Using "pull request acceptance rate" as a proxy for "code quality" is highly dubious. It might equally well indicate that their PRs are more relevant, smaller and hence easier to review, more basic or any number of things.
Since we are looking at a ratio, the gap could also be in the numerator. Maybe men are just more likely to submit PRs, for a given skill level. Many people claim that female developers are being put down by their peers, so it would be natural if they are more hesitant to file a PR, only doing so when they are certain it's good. Etc.
2. The findings are based on a subset of total pull requests, namely those with users whose gender can be identified one way or another. Clearly the slight gender gap could just as well lie here, for example "skilled female developers are more likely than unskilled ones to be show their gender on Google+, compared to the ratio for men".
Also, since there is such an enormous difference between the absolute number of male and female developers (probably at least an order of magnitude), it's quite surprising that the gap here is only a couple of percentage points. Given that difference, it's easy to imagine lots of potential reasons for the small bias.
This site appears to be a mens rights site, pretending it's "egalitarian" when it's anything but. Just skimming both this article and the About page, it's pretty strongly insulting feminism and dismissing their complaints, while at the same time complaining about misandry and '"genuine" discrimination'.
Soooo this article challenges the original article's validity with stuff like:
> There are far more male users on GitHub then one could argue that men are in fact far better at coding because far more are actually doing it and many women are missing in action. Perhaps the small number of women who get involved are marginally better on average, but they would still be vastly outnumbered by men who are equally or more capable
How is this more valid? They complain that the study is not scientifically peer-reviewed (which is fair enough, I don't challenge that) and then come up with this dodgy analysis? Gee they sound stupid.
There's no such thing as an objective source. Advertisement, journalism, propaganda... they all blend together. It really shouldn't be shocking that so many are retreating into their own echo chambers. What's the point of trying to find a reputable source of news, when none of them are?
Aside from the story, I really do think that women write better code.
I think it stems from society's tendency to be overly critical of women and the things that they do. If an external force is hypercritical of you, then most people would internalize it. I think this logically leads to better outcomes in things that require critique, like code.
Now this idea has much farther reaching (and more negative) consequences for women imo, but I think it applies here.
Original article [0].
Here's the BBC's analysis of the complaint [1].
[0] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35559439
[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/comp-reports/ecu/womenwriteb...