He met the girl via a website that claimed to be age-verified. Turns out she lied about her age, and the site didn't actually (properly) verify her. He still should've verified her age himself, but it kinda changes the narrative.
I'm not glossing over it, it's a different point. They are implying a causal link between the 7% and the 59% when they haven't demonstrated that. They show that individual authors got a lot of help that wasn't awarded with authorship. You can point out that nowadays this work would be worthy of authorship, and that women were somewhat overrepresented in the acknowledgements without authorship. That doesn't demonstrate the big claims of sexism they're stating/implying. If they showed men getting authorship for only the programming help, and women not getting authorship in comparable situations, that would be a different matter.
I didn't say sexism didn't (or doesn't) exist, there's plenty of other evidence that it did/does. I'm just saying it doesn't follow.
And if I say something can be explained by evolutionary psychology that doesn't mean that therefore it's fine, or that it couldn't be changed given the right system of incentives.
It's a pity that this interesting research into changing customs in science and publishing is so driven by a predetermined narrative.
They found women accounted for 59% of acknowledged programmers -- so 41% were men and got the same treatment. The obvious conclusion would be that programming wasn't acknowledged the way it is now, but instead they push the narrative that they weren't acknowledged because they were women. Giving overlooked women in science some due attention is perfectly fine, but unwarranted conclusions about the causes for various situations aren't, in my opinion.
And the same with their explanation for how it changed. They state that it's in part because the work started being done by graduate students and postdocs, but then still conclude "Programmers, essentially, only became rewarded with authorship when they started becoming male." (and this "when" here is clearly intended to be read as a causal when). Of course there is a more plausible explanation, namely that men started becoming more interested in programming when it started presenting better opportunities for high-paying and high status jobs. Fully what is expected based on evolutionary psychology.