This study is biased toward students who already knew CS before taking the class, which is a substantial number. If someone can explain how this methodology makes sense, I'll start to buy the argument.

People used to say women were less likely to have a "natural ability" at CS, despite the huge amounts of seminal CS work that women did in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.

That changed when the Apple II came out, and it was marketed at boys. Boys practiced CS before college and basically drowned out the true newbies in their 101 classes.

After schools realized this, they offered pre-101 catchup classes, and that has totally eliminated the gap that we saw before.

I've still never seen anything to indicate that aptitude to program (as a job, not as a researcher or theorist) exists.