I personally don't think gender segregation should have a place in tech discussions, or any discussion in general, as long as conversation is held in good faith

I personally don't think gender segregation should have a place in tech discussions, or any discussion in general, as long as conversation is held in good faith and in a respectful manner. However for the people that do want it, I think that they need to look further than HN. By its centralized nature HN will guarantee that the over represented voices will drown everyone else. The only way I see this kind of an effort gathering steam is by using one of the discussion platforms coming from the ActivityPub community as a starting point, but unfortunately that brings all the problems of building a community from scratch to the surface. Even if the community would be connected to the greater mass of the fediverse, it would still require a lot of effort to gather mind share. :( But I would still be interested in seeing such an effort take root. (And to toot my own horn, I do happen to have a project that can be used for this purpose; details in my bio, anyone feel free to reach out.)