The comment that started this thread did no such thing. In fact, the entire point of that comment was to argue that this is itself an unfair stereotype of the community (i.e. that such a belief is not prevalent).

It instead quoted a claim from the article - which indeed implies this in a vague, hand-waving way, by citing another paper. When I look at the abstract for that paper, in turn, I don't actually see the claim asserted; the closest it comes is

> Challenges that women face in OSS are mainly social, including lack of peer parity and non-inclusive communication from a toxic culture

Also, that paper in turn describes itself as "a survey of the literature".

The whole thing comes across to me as an act of citogenesis (https://xkcd.com/978/).

> One follows from the other

There are two ways to interpret this.

Either women are naturally worse programmers and that leads to less interest, or they are less interested in programming which makes women worse programmers.

Unless I am missing another interpretation, both imply women are worse programmers.