This post was briefly flag-killed by users. (That's what "[flagkilled]" means on a post.) We've unkilled it, obviously.
Personally, I found the post distasteful, though not enough so to merit a flag. I think its us-vs-them tone and cherry-picking of facts makes it very easy to dismiss outright. I think that does the women in our industry a disservice and exacerbates the problem.
This only happens because the problem is constantly ignored. Personally, it's clear to me that nearly every single time anyone tries to talk about *ism in tech it degrades into a meltdown of horrible and/or needlessly pedantic comments. So much so that the actual problem never gets addressed. No choice but to try again and again; focusing harder and harder on examples. I do notice though, over a wide enough range of time, the conversations do very slowly inch towards maturity. And just think, if not even HN can handle the topic... what hope is there for anywhere else? Seriously, if anyone knows of another online community of mature discussion comparable to HN I'd like to know. Right now, HN seems to be in a class of its own in regards to quality of comments.
religionism.
People here (and everywhere google is a verb) ignorance is not only implied, but encouraged.
The intelligent discoursers I know have all moved to communities like slatestarcodex, LessWrong, potentially-vile "neoreaction" sites (you can read Mencius Moldbug's writings for a primer), and other obscure parts of the Twitterverse. Your mileage may vary with any of these subcultures, and there is plenty of "toxic" content, but IMO the quality of discourse is vastly higher that what you'd expect on a typical Hacker News thread for anything not explicitly related to startups or programming.
"The X bias is Y, and from the data we'd expect a bias of Z, therefore the bias is D".
By calling it sexism, we make it a value judgement. By talking about bias, we remove judgement.
I stopped reading and flagged the article after getting to this part: There is, though, one thing these two founders are missing, and it is almost the sine qua non of the fabled Silicon Valley startup. They don’t have penises.
This is trashy writing and flamebait, and I don't want to see in on HN. There is a vast library of quality literature on gender issues out there, and I think it's fair for us to reject articles that cannot rise above vulgarity.