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clarissethorn comments on Less Wrong NYC: Case Study of a Successful Rationalist Chapter - Less Wrong
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I'm a little surprised to see the issues of LWers interacting with women reduced to "being careful when discussing explicit awareness of social reality" ... with a link to PUA stuff.
1) PUA stuff is hardly the only example out there of "explicit awareness of social reality".
2) It's quite telling that the implication of the post is that "women don't like explicit awareness of social reality", rather than the (more accurate) "women don't like PUA".
One way to encourage women to participate in rationalist communities might be to make a conscious effort not to portray us as silly, manipulative, fickle, irrational gold-diggers. Some rationalists do a good job of this ... many don't. And PUAs, rationalist and otherwise, are usually bad at this. (Yes, there are exceptions.)
Are rationalists more likely than average men to treat women like silly, fickle, manipulative gold diggers? As far as I can tell, trying to be rational has only given me more reasons to treat women and humans in general better.
Tangentially, I try to avoid treating women differently since the cultural assumptions about how each gender thinks are rarely accurate, and appreciate it when women do the same thing.
Of course, it depends more on the individuals involved than anything else, but I would say that a non-negligible percentage of rationalists are unwilling to question gender biases (and in fact, many get defensive because they prefer to consider themselves rational and non-sexist, and then in their defensiveness, fail to examine their biases). This is common enough that the geek feminist blog Restructure has a whole post called The Myth Of White Male Geek Rationality: http://restructure.wordpress.com/2010/08/23/myth-of-white-male-geek-rationality/