Every time gender is so much as mentioned on Hacker News, it is immediately flagged off the site. The community's lack of courage to even discuss these issues is pretty depressing.
If anything, writing an article about gender-based discrimination seems to be one of the easiest ways to get an item to get noticed on HN. Only privacy issues seem to be more discussed lately.
I agree that this topic merits discussion and shouldn't be flagged, but you're just wrong when you say the community lacks the courage to discuss these topics.
https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=sexism...
edit: Three of the four articles you link in your reply to this post have well over 100 comments each, so you're only supporting my position that the community is very much willing to discuss this topic, and in fact, does so pretty regularly. Any topic that hits the front page over and over again (in this case, discussion regarding TitStare) gets flagged as people get fatigued by the same repetitive discussion. This happened with SOPA, and Snowden and every other issue that reached maximum saturation in the community.
"'Titstare' app at TechCrunch: women in tech deserve better": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6352595
"Tit Stare – We wish to apologise": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6357607
"Business Insider CTO Forced to Resign Following Twitter Firestorm": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6360328
"NPR: Sexism In The Tech Industry Takes Center Stage": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6374508
Sadly, HNSearch does not show the lifespan of articles on the front page of the site.
Oh, and we can now add this thread to that list:
http://i.imgur.com/GhU3mRV.png
EDIT: All those threads do have plenty of comments, because people went out of their way to link to threads that were flagged off the home page. It presents a huge visibility problem - there were responses in the Business Insider thread asking "What happened at TC Disrupt", because they never found out about it.
The fact that we both have to edit our posts because this thread has been killed within minutes of posting ought to indicate to you that flagging is real, and does happen.