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I wouldn't know. It seems reasonable.

All the academic studies I have seen either adjust for it explicitly or put forward a strong case on why it isn't being included.

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It's certainly reasonable for a studies across fields with hourly pay or, e.g., including both part-time and full-time (such as the BLS survey cited by the Forbes article), but I'm not sure we can make that assumption for software development - programmer productivity in a given time period is, on its own, somewhat mythically considered to vary by orders of magnitude.

Fair point.

I'd argue it's a more logical and likely explanation than sexism though.

Anecdotal evidence matches this up pretty closely. Better programmers tend to work more, it's just a fact of life.

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