Girls mostly just clone or fork and change locally, I think. To be less-intrusive.
Discussion
Then how do you learn what it takes to bring something upstream? We for example encourage our interns to propose changes to open source projects. There is a lot to learn there about how to do things properly. All assuming you don‘t treat GitHub as if it was a GDoc or CMS.
I ask male developers I know to submit for me.
That's what she said?
Well, I like knowing that they also think it's worth submitting and when questions arise, they respond and sound all official and mansplain-y, and I can just lurk.
It's different in my own projects or with some particular developers I have a good rapport with because they're used to me and take me seriously.