I think this is a great idea.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tria...
https://peerj.com/articles/cs-111/
They explored a lot of factors to do with gender in a data set of several years' worth of public pull requests on GitHub. One of the more interesting findings was that women's pull requests get accepted more often, but that a couple factors can strongly affect that, including whether the person reviewing the PR knows the author of the PR is a woman:
For outsiders, we see evidence for gender bias: women’s acceptance rates drop by 12.0% when their gender is identifiable, compared to when it is not (χ2(df = 1, n = 16, 258) = 158, p < .001). There is a smaller 3.8% drop for men (χ2(df = 1, n = 608,764) = 39, p < .001). Women have a higher acceptance rate of pull requests overall (as we reported earlier), but when they are outsiders and their gender is identifiable, they have a lower acceptance rate than men.
Identification online is totally voluntary, so perhaps there is something about people who feel the need to specify their gender online, when it isn't necessary (such as when coding) that causes their pull requests to be rejected more.
To me, it's not very surprising as in many countries your picture is customarily included in your curriculum vitae, and as Github is seen as a professional site akin to LinkedIn, people simply put up their pictures there as well.
This is anecdotal, but it's very rare for me to interact with someone on Github and have no idea as to their real name, gender, and face.
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I'll also add, there does seem to be cultural divide between us---as noted that you believe that people have to "feel a need" to add any information (photo/real name) that would show their gender when it isn't "necessary".
Whereas I feel that "real life" identification is the default, and pseudo-anonymity is a considered choice.
In fact this matches an observation an acquaintance of mine of is Post doc in the Physics department made. He is giving courses at University for small groups, that go with the lecture course where students get there corrected exercises and present them. So he said that women in those courses are more or less the only ones motivated and actually being interested in the stuff and that the exercises are also better.
I guess this doesn't have much to do with biology and Google Echo chambers etc but rather that people are aware of biases and counteract them.