In general: people's attitudes towards the type of work and competency of women in certain roles entirely culturally engrained, not sexually engrained. Just because a particular company's boss is a woman doesn't mean she wouldn't see other women as not suited to particular jobs, or men more suited, etc.
In this particular case: The people I have met and talked to were on the web programming side, not product development. Between their stories and my own experiences at other companies, companies that focus on Area Of Business X tend to be founded by experts in X, and have no clue what Y or Z are even there for. So if ThinkGeek were, say, founded by product developers, then IT would get the short end of the stick all the same as if it were founded by sales people.
Yes. There's a good study where the same resume was given to science faculty to rate, sometimes with a male name, sometimes female. When the resume had a female name, it was rated as less competent and deserving of a lower salary and less mentoring. Male and female professors displayed the same bias against the female resumes: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/14/1211286109
Studies like this have been repeated over and over again. This bias is well ingrained in culture. Another good one was a study where people where given a story about a successful person then asked to give adjectives to describe these people. When the person has a male name the adjectives were positive. Female names got negative adjectives.
The other interesting thing is since the 1970s orchestras have used blind auditions where the person auditioning is out of view. Since then females in orchestras have increased dramatically.
A swirl of other high-level staffing switch-ups also occurred, including a handful of layoffs. Two of the people let go were the remaining co-founders: Vadnais, who essentially invented ThinkGeek, and Frazier, who coined the ThinkGeek slogan: “Stuff for smart masses.”
The idea of being a founder doesn't seem to mean much to them, so I think the scales tip towards the "not entirely surprising" side.
ThinkGeek's female co-founder here... It's true, I'm a founder and was let go. We sold the company early on and though I had a lot of input on hires, it wasn't all up to me, especially as we grew. I can't comment on how women were or are treated by management, but I always did my best to create an awesome culture for everybody regardless of sex, background or geek/nerd affiliation.
I very fondly remember ThinkGeek's early days, if you start a new venture, let the HN community know! I'll definitely be in line as a customer and I'm sure many others here would be too.
Even with a female co-founder? You would think that this kind of behavior would be less common with one.
(Though it might not be entirely surprising)