I saw this not long after you posted it. We were ordering lunch, so I didn't have the ability to reply immediately, but I also wasn't sure I wanted to reply at all.
My ex husband had some terrific saying to the effect of "That's a When did you stop beating your wife? type question." And his point was that there is a deep assumption of guilt in the framing of some questions such that it's nearly impossible to answer them well at all and not somehow get trapped into agreeing that you are guilty.
Because if your knee jerk reaction is "I haven't stopped beating my wife....(because I've never been a wife beater)", before you can get to the "I've never beaten my wife" part of your thought process, the asker will go "So, you still beat your wife. I see." and won't let you rebut that. If you try to clarify, they will jump all over that as you changing your story or something and no matter what you say, they will return to their assumption of guilt and see every single answer as additional evidence of your guilt.
Your question here concerning women and HN implicitly assumes that the mods and/or the guidelines are somehow at fault and doing something wrong, and I don't think that's the case.
I hesitate to reply at all because part of the answer in my mind is that "It skewed more male when Paul Graham was the moderator. I think Dan Gackle does excellent work and he's made good headway on the issue in the years he has been here. It just takes time to turn the Titanic around as the saying goes."
And I don't like wanting to say that because I feel like then people will infer that I am accusing Paul Graham of something and that's not remotely my intent. It's like saying "I haven't stopped beating my wife....(because I never started beating my wife, damn it!)" and knowing everyone listening is going to go "Oh...so you really are pure evil. Thanks for clearing that up."
I don't think Paul Graham is somehow "to blame" for the forum skewing strongly male. YC itself has a good track record on diversity and my impression is that they are actually really quiet about that fact.
According to something Jessica Livingston wrote, Jessica and Paul were dating and they kept batting about ideas while some company was kind of stringing her along and not quite hiring her and Paul said one night "Let's start our own company." And within a day or two he contacted his two co-founders from Via Web and asked them to get on board and they agreed to do so, but only on a part-time basis (or so I understand).
So the company actually started out fifty-percent female on day one, though it didn't stay fifty-percent female for very long, and after a few years the other half of the two initial founders retired. So it's really much more of a woman-led company than I think gets generally recognized. I think Jessica Livingston is much more of a cornerstone of YC than the world thinks. The world thinks of YC as "Paul Graham's company," even though he stepped down several years ago from an active role in running it and Jessica is still there.
I know of a VC company that was founded explicitly to fund minority-led companies (women, people of color and LGBTQ founders) and the founder of that company has said she tells her people to not apply to YC because she has a poor opinion of them. Which I find bizarre because everything I see indicates YC has a lot of partners that are women, people of color and/or LGBTQ.
I'm currently going through Startup School and both the presenters in the videos are fairly frequently not cis het white males and the live audiences for these videos are quite diverse. A lot of people asking questions have thick accents.
So my general impression is that YC has a remarkably good track record on diversity that largely goes unrecognized and I don't think HN ended up skewing so starkly male due to sexism on Paul Graham's part. All the evidence suggests he, personally, has a good track record on treating women like equals and if he didn't YC wouldn't exist at all.
I wasn't here at the very beginning. I joined in July 2009 (under a different handle) and I was really sick at the time and it took a few years for me to realize that people here were talking at me like I was "prominent" for a female member and for me to go "What the hell?" and start trying to put together data of some sort privately just to figure out how to navigate HN better myself.
So I don't actually know how HN ended up skewing so strongly male to begin with (because I wasn't here to see how that went down) and I probably have no hope of figuring out how that came to be. But I have no reason to believe it's because YC or the moderators of HN or the guidelines for HN are somehow wrong and bad and sexist and excluding women.
I think it's probably more complicated than that and probably a lot of it boils down to something I think Dan Gackle once said to the effect of "When it's raining hard everywhere, it gets wet in here too."
In other words, sexism is everywhere. It's not like HN invented it. So I think it's unreasonable to implicitly assume HN is "doing something wrong" in that regard.
I have a pretty high opinion of HN overall. I think a better question would be "What is HN doing right that it's gotten better over the years given how rampant sexism is generally in the world?"
(Yes, I know, this isn't the answer most people expect given how much I bitch about sexism on HN at times. It impacts me. I need to try to make my life work.)