As far as I'm concerned, I don't even look at the username of the person whom I'm replying to. I just put in my two cents and take part in the discussion, only if it turns out to be really, really interesting do I actually look at the username to go to said person's profile. I'm quite sure a lot of other posters have a similar attitude. HN is a forum about interesting stuff, and (dare I say it) similar to it's secular community, is also probably a very asexual (unconcerned with the gender of the participant) community. If the author of the post had included more examples, then perhaps we could come to some sort of statistical guess about whether gender really is a 'problem' or not.