Women Write Better Code, Study Suggests
The US researchers analysed nearly 1.4 million users of the open source program-sharing service Github.
They found that pull requests - or suggested code changes - made on the service by women were more likely to be accepted than those by men.
The paper is awaiting peer review.
This means the results have yet to be critically appraised by other experts.
The researchers, from the computer science departments at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and North Carolina State University, looked at around four million people who logged on to Github on a single day - 1 April 2015.
Github is an enormous developer community which does not request gender information from its 12 million users.