A good test to see if a topic make sense to discuss on HN is if people are willing to calmly discuss the merits of it.
The author says they are interested in the humanities and like to see articles focus on structural barriers faced by women in the workplace. I doubt however they want to see article discussing the merits of the topic, i.e. if women does face barriers in the work place. The result is that anyone who does not share the same perspective is not welcome in the discussion and the environment from that confrontation produce the opposite of thoughtful and substantive discussion.
Political discussion does not need to end like that and many topics which does not have the above property do pop up in HN.
That might have few false-positives (being wrong when we say "this is good for HN"), but the false negatives would be huge. There's plenty on topic that still devolves into flame wars. Off the top of my head, these seem clearly on topic but discussion devolves: Vim vs Emacs. Javascript vs anything. Static vs dynamic types. Apple's keyboards. OpenAI.
The author says they are interested in the humanities and like to see articles focus on structural barriers faced by women in the workplace. I doubt however they want to see article discussing the merits of the topic, i.e. if women does face barriers in the work place. The result is that anyone who does not share the same perspective is not welcome in the discussion and the environment from that confrontation produce the opposite of thoughtful and substantive discussion.
Political discussion does not need to end like that and many topics which does not have the above property do pop up in HN.