I'm not sure I like your solutions but I think your sort of experience might not be atypical. My female friends and family have often reacted to criticism of their ideas with what I (a man) found to be an overly defensive posture. My reply was always to tell them not to take things so personally. My guess is that boys are tend to receive more encouragement and confidences boosting from parents and teachers and so are more confident putting their ideas out there and don't take poor reception as hard- but I don't really know.

I've definitely made comments (here and elsewhere) that were taken poorly and lead me to back off commenting for a while. I know where your coming from but I think identifying votes can easily lead retaliatory voting which is all kinds of irrational and is a disincentive for honest voting. I'd also be wary of devaluing karma by being more generous with it.

I'm curious what you have in mind for (2). I guess if topics were specifically about gender-related biases there would be room for it. I think some of few women here might be annoyed by this.

My suggestions are two fold.

1. It would be nice if there was some information on individual comments regarding either the poster's join date, post count, or karma. I'd prefer one of the first two to avoid people favoring comments by people with higher karma counts. I suggest this specifically so that we can easily identify newcomers and not treat them too harshly. There are pretty high barriers of entry here (the OB back catalog is almost required reading and if you're not familiar with Ev psych, cog sci or programming you're gonna get lost at times). We could be a lot more welcoming if we knew who we were welcoming.

2. Down votes should be followed by comments that explain them whenever possible. The whole point of rating comments and posts, in addition to sorting them, is to provide feedback. But frankly people don't get more rational just because one of their comments has a negative number attached. People need to know what the community didn't like about their comment and what facts they should consider that might lead them to change their mind. And in critical replies education should take priority over scoring rationalist points for mocking cleverness.

I think these ideas might help with the gender thing, but frankly they'd just make for a more sustainable community.