Sexism usually presents itself not as some blatant and obvious different standard, but as a subtler pattern of behaviors. It ends up being maddeningly difficult to get other people to see it.
In fact, it took me an extremely long time to conclude that my gender was a problem on HN because it is a remarkably well-behaved environment. I am only able to recognize certain issues because of experiencing the pattern more blatantly elsewhere.
Yet, the reality is that I am a very prominent woman on HN and I remain extremely poor. The connection between my gender and my poverty seems blatantly obvious to me. I have extremely good reason to believe that if I were male, I would be taken far more seriously and people would promote my work. I would have more traffic, and that would result in more income and I would find it easier to get useful feedback.
Of course, no one owes me any of that. But it is, nonetheless, a source of enormous frustration for me. Thus, I feel it matters that I speak out. No one seems to even notice the glaring example that the highest ranked woman here is desperately poor and homeless while the highest ranked men are all quite comfortable and I am reasonably confident that at least two of them are self-made millionaires.
When there are as many self made millionaire women on the leaderboard as there are self made millionaire men, then you can tell me that remarks like the one above -- which is, happily, currently flagged to death-- are not an expression of sexism.