As others have noted, this is unlikely to explain it.
I'm a professor at Carnegie Mellon. In the most recent semester, I taught a large undergraduate intro to programming course (CMU 15-112 is similar in audience to CS50 at Harvard. Our cheating ratio - about 10% - was similar this year, and was also higher than normal). The course is taken by almost all first-year students at Carnegie Mellon - it has about a 50/50 gender ratio. Out of curiosity, I examined the stats for our cheating cases - briefly, so I may have made some errors. But males accounted for about 2/3rds of the cheating cases. It's not clear that that is statistically significant, or if it boils down to "about the same."
Unlike your hypothesis, this is based upon the actual cheating statistics from a class of about 450 people. :-)
Some time over drinks, remind me to tell you the story of the guy who asked his g/f to go get him a snack from the vending machine, stuck a USB drive in her computer, and stole her homework to hand in as his own.
Cheating happens across genders and nationalities. We look hard to identify trends, because we try hard to find ways to intervene before the cheating happens. Most cheating comes from poorly-managed stress. A smaller, regrettable subset comes from people who actively seek to cheat their way through something -- but most of it is simply a bad decision under time pressure.
The NYT article's hypothesis that people are putting more hopes on CS classes for their future careers rings true to me. We see a lot of people who are (a) not doing very well in the class; and (b) (probably mistakenly) believe they need an A or a B in the class in order to succeed in <thing they want to do>. This creates a stressful situation for them, and some respond in a way that bites them in the long run: they cheat. And, because this is CS and we have MOSS and other tools, they get caught.