I think it’s important to clearly delineate a few things here, to focus on the practical impact of this question and avoid politicising it to much (not that anyone here has, but I’m guessing some people would be reticent to wade into these waters due to the political / social climate(s) around issues such as this).
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Gender identity, not identity in general. Online gender identity, and diversity more broadly, is a subset of the larger issue of online identity. Within the larger issue of online identity, the issue of anonymity can be gender neutral. You may want to not use a real name or profile picture for reasons unrelated to your identity as a person, gender or otherwise. As has been pointed out, I don’t think we want tackle the whole real name / anonymity debate in this context. We should focus on the issue of gender and diversity.
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Substance over form. As @meglio alluded to there are differences between both: 1) registration and activity (i.e. being a real part of a community); and 2) perceptions of diversity and statistics about diversity.
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#notallcommunities. And, as @meglio also pointed out, this issue affects different communities differently. Many tech focused communities feel quite ‘male’ dominant. His community feels (is) female dominant.
Given that, I think we’re dealing with two issues here:
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Knowledge. Site admins and mods may not know if diversity is an issue (assuming they care about it). On this front I also think @barryvan’s suggestion is a good one. v1 of this is actually possible right now. You could add a custom user field in the admin panel, require it at sign up, not show it on the user profile and add a description telling the user that this information is kept private. As to the broader questionnaire @jcoates referred to, you could do that with the Custom Wizard plugin (albeit not the part about sending it to a randomised subset).
The knowledge issue is itself a subset of a bigger issue: What does my community look like? Figuring out ways to have statistics about the actual people involved in your online community baked into Discourse would be in-line with Discourse’s overall approach of helping people build civilised online communities.
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Culture. As has been pointed out, it often takes initiative by leaders of a community create an inclusive culture. There may be a role for the software itself in this too though. In fact Discourse is explicitly designed to play a role in helping to construct a ‘civilised’ community. On this front, perhaps we could review these aspects of that structure with an eye to gender inclusiveness, in particular the wording and content of the default community guidelines, education messages and other text. I’m not saying they are necessarily lacking in that respect, I just haven’t read them through that lens before.
Discourse isn’t going to ‘solve’ gender and social issues in society(s) at large. But within Discourse’s remit of facilitating civilised discussion online, it can give specific tools and advice to people who want to:
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Know more about their communities, particularly how diverse they are.
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Make their communities more inclusive for non-dominant groups.
At the end of the day we may find that Discourse itself is already set up to do this (e.g. the custom user field at login). And if it is, maybe Discourse should mention that somewhere in a tasteful way on its homepage 