There appear to be no women on the leaderboard. The leaderboard lists 100 names. The top of it is stable, but, my understanding is that your name drops off of it if you are inactive for X amount of time. The bottom is not stable. Names appear and disappear. So there are likely something over 100 members with enough karma to qualify for the leaderboard, at some points during the year. I appear to have the highest karma of any openly female member and I am thousands short of the leaderboard.
I posted a question or two trying to find out who was female here. Some women created accounts in order to reply. So, there appear to be a lot of women who lurk and read but do not feel comfortable participating.
I ended up gathering some objective data to the best of my ability because the social piece is pretty opaque here. I did not have an agenda initially. But I was experiencing a lot of friction and there was soft social evidence suggesting I was "prominent" for a woman here at a time when I had something like 3000 or 4000 karma. I put that data on my blog. For example: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/01/some-raw-dat...
I can't prove any of this. If you want to be pedantic, hey, you win. But as a woman who ended up inadvertently researching how prominent I was because I was having what I felt was an excessive amount of friction for a "nobody," my opinion is that a) HN is not very welcoming of women and b) it has gotten better over time and is continuing to improve.
Do with that opinion as you wish. I don't feel like getting dragged into some stupid argument where multiple men verbally beat on me while swearing women don't face challenges here. Such situations never seem to strike the multiple men engaging in the pile on as either ironic nor as de facto evidence supporting my assertion that there are issues.