Thoughts on this study? Two economists did a study to show that fewer COVID deaths were an effect of having a woman leading the country (apologies for beating this dead horse; I have my own thoughts but wanted to hear other what other people thought)

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/women-leaders-policymakers-covid19-coronavirus/

Too long didn't read/don't care version: the researchers tried to show that a female-led country would have fewer COVID deaths than a male-led country of similar population size, GDP, percent of population over 65, and percent of urban population. Since the effects of any potential confounding factors have been controlled for, they felt they could then conclude that the differences in deaths was an effect of the gender of the country's leader.

They matched each female-led country with the male-led country that was most similar in terms of factors such as population, GDP, percent of population over 65, and percent urban (conceptually, this would mean Iceland, for example, would be matched with a male-led country with a population of around 350,000 and similar GDP and age distributions and a similar percent of the population living in cities). Examples of some matches were New Zealand with Ireland, Germany with UK, Serbia with Israel, and Bangladesh with Pakistan.

Within each pair, they showed the number of deaths in the female-led country was consistently lower than the number of deaths in the male-led country (and found it was statistically significant). They tried repeating this analysis by matching each female-led country with the two most similar male-led countries and then with the three most similar male-led countries.

What are your thoughts? Do you see any fundamental flaws with this or do you think this is viable? Like I said, I have my own thoughts, but I wanted to hear what other people thought before sharing mine.