It's obviously something that impacts many people in this line of work, otherwise this community would not have such strong opinions about it.
Does Hacker News suppress other topics or just gender bias?
This is so hurtful.
Hacker News does not suppress this topic. But this topic has been very well covered, so the bar for what constitutes a novel contribution is fairly high.
There are also a lot of "Your rights online" stories on Hacker News. A lot of these get flagged into oblivion as well. This isn't because we don't care about our rights, but that the topic is sufficiently well-covered that it takes an exceptional story to actually bring something new to the conversation instead of just flaring up old arguments.
It isn't that we don't think the topic your blog post is important. It is. But just because a topic is important doesn't mean every article on that topic will be widely upvoted. In general, it's actually harder to rank with an "important" topic because you have a lot of competition and there is only so much space for stories.
So, please don't take it personally or interpret this as people suppressing the topic. It's just Hacker News trying to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high. We don't have very good organizational tools here, so we kind of have to resort to blunt weapons that can look overly harsh when you're on the receiving end.
That is, if the topic is important and valuable to HN it will be valuable even if you didn't necessarily care so much about the topic.
That's sad, because there was good discussion going about objectification in marketing, and if the tech industry should be held to a higher standard as compared to other industries.
(Also, HN meta-discussions or any articles about Bitcoin tend to get flagged into oblivion as well. I guess people are just tired of reading that stuff.)
Which story currently on the front page should be replaced by your article?
As I write this it has 41 pts and 121 comments - that seems like an article that got some attention.