It is absolutely beyond my understanding why Filipe's comment has been voted up to +13 since what Douglas wrote was not an "attempt to explain" anything and he didn't assert that anyone was discriminating against anyone. Filipe's comment is based on two gross misrepresentations of what Douglas wrote, and on the basis of those gross misrepresentations he's made an entirely unreasonable accusation, and apparently the consensus of the Less Wrong community is that this deserves to be at +13.
In what possible world is Filipe's grotesque misrepresentation reasonable (and indeed worthy of all those upvotes) and gently pointing out its errors unreasonable (and deserving of drive-by downvotes)?
Personally, I upvoted Filipe's comment for the reason Emile gave here, I agree with Manfred's comment here, and while the second part of Filipe's comment could be taken as overly politicizing, I feel that your comments have acted to degenerate the situation further. For reasons Nick Tarleton has outlined in this comment, "blank-statey attempts to explain the gender ratio in High-IQ communities due to some form of discrimination, without any evidence" are something that some people in this community have become rather sensitive to.
If you had responded by saying, for example, "I don't think that this article is arguing that the gender disparity in this community rests primarily on behavioral issues of the members, but considering the self-confessed social fluency issues many of our members have, I think it's likely there are people here who would benefit from it," I think you could have de-escalated hostility in the discussion. The reply you gave to Manfred, though, appears far more hostile to me than Filipe's original comment, and it looks to me like you're doing more to blow out of proportion a possible cause for offense.
I upvoted Filipe's comment because it asked a question the answer to which I was also interested in, and I have downvoted a number of yours because I feel that you have done an inappropriately poor job assuming good faith.
One of the lessons highlighted in the thread "Less Wrong NYC: Case Study of a Successful Rationalist Chapter" is Gender ratio matters.
There have recently been a number of articles addressing one social skills issue that might be affecting this, from the perspective of a geeky/sciencefiction community with similar attributes to LessWrong, and I want to link to these, not just so the people potentially causing problems get to read them, but also so everyone else knows the resource is there and has a name for the problem, which may facilitate wider discussion and make it easier for others to know when to point towards the resources those who would benefit by them.
However before I do, in the light of RedRobot's comment in the "Of Gender and Rationality" thread, I'd like to echo a sentiment from one of the articles, that people exhibiting this behaviour may be of any gender and may victimise upon any gender. And so, while it may be correlated with a particular gender, it is the behaviour that should be focused upon, and turning this thread into bashing of one gender (or defensiveness against perceived bashing) would be unhelpful.
Ok, disclaimers out of the way, here are the links:
Some of those raise deeper issues about rape culture and audience as enabler, but the TLDR summary is:
EDITED TO ADD:
Despite the way some of the links are framed as being addressed to creepers, this post is aimed at least as much at the community as a whole, intended to trigger a discussion on how the community should best go about handling such a problem once identified, with the TLDR being "set of restraints to place on someone who is burning the commons", rather that a complete description that guarantees that anyone who doesn't meet it isn't creepy. (Thank you to jsteinhardt for clearly verbalising the misinterpretation - for discussion see his reply to this post)