A long blog post explains why the author, a feminist, is not comfortable with the rationalist community despite thinking it is "super cool and interesting". It's directed specifically at Yvain, but it's probably general enough to be of some interest here.
http://apophemi.wordpress.com/2014/01/04/why-im-not-on-the-rationalist-masterlist/
I'm not sure if I can summarize this fairly but the main thrust seems to be that we are overly willing to entertain offensive/taboo/hurtful ideas and this drives off many types of people. Here's a quote:
In other words, prizing discourse without limitations (I tried to find a convenient analogy for said limitations and failed. Fenders? Safety belts?) will result in an environment in which people are more comfortable speaking the more social privilege they hold.
The author perceives a link between LW type open discourse and danger to minority groups. I'm not sure whether that's true or not. Take race. Many LWers are willing to entertain ideas about the existence and possible importance of average group differences in psychological traits. So, maybe LWers are racists. But they're racists who continually obsess over optimizing their philanthropic contributions to African charities. So, maybe not racists in a dangerous way?
An overly rosy view, perhaps, and I don't want to deny the reality of the blogger's experience. Clearly, the person is intelligent and attracted to some aspects of LW discourse while turned off by other aspects.
Maybe it's just that when someone says: "I feel uncomfortable about X", my natural reaction is thinking about a possible fix; but when someone says: "I am a member of a tribe T and we dislike X", my natural reaction is: Fuck you, and fuck your tribe T!
Only later comes the rationalization, that improving a situation for a specific person, especially for someone who feels some discomfort and yet wants to be a member of the community, is good for the community. But obeying demands made in the name of a different tribe, just helps the other tribe conquer this territory; and the complaining person probably wasn't interested in membership too much, just wanted to plant a flag of the tribe T here.
My model of a person who wrote this article is that even if LW changed according to their wishes, they wouldn't join LW anyway (they would just tick off another internet battle won), or they would join but would contribute mostly by criticizing other things they don't like, making some existing members (including women) uncomfortable.
Still, there is a question: If we change according to this person's wishes, maybe this person will not join us, but perhaps some other person would? In which case, I recommend thinking about making LW more comfortable to this hypothetical other person, whose wishes in fact don't have to be the same. Maybe this other person would actually prefer to express their opinions more freely.
According to the survey, it's 36% liberal, 30% libertarian, 27% socialist, (edit:) 3% conservative. (Okay, that's all members, but since men are 90%, I assume the numbers for men would be pretty much the same, plus or minus at most 10% in some category.) At worst that would be (edit:) three different clusters; and any specific of them would be a minority.
Still, some groups are louder than the others. For example, the Moldbug fans are impossible to overlook. On the other hand, I don't remember hearing much socialist opinions here; and I think I would have noticed. Not sure what it means. (Different average loudness of different groups?)
Common reaction among who? The people who decided to write a critical article about LW? That is not necessary a reaction of an average person.
Assuming that more women on LW would mean more articles and comments written by women, it would either mean that the content gets less repulsive on average... or that LW fans are repulsive to outsiders whether they are male or female, so at least it cannot be blamed on gender disparity anymore.
This doesn't matter for your point; I'm just letting you know: the survey results showed 3% conservative, not 35%. There were 35 total conservatives, which was 3% of respondents.