The fight against sexism is not a free pass
antirez.com
antirez.com
First, let me get it out of the way that I actually agree with the pull request. In this day, the personal pronoun "they" makes a more inclusive pronoun that just "him". Zed Shaw's suggestion of "you" is also a good alternative, particularly if you're wanting to be less formal.
That said, let me note that many of us were taught in school that using "he" here is the preferred pronoun. And that's just one reason why I can imagine why someone would reject this pull request. Because as much as I agree with the PR, I have the ability to conceive of other perspectives. We have no idea why Ben chose to reject the request.
1. Maybe he thought it was incorrect grammar. I disagree, since there's a strong history of singular, third-person use of "they" in English. But it's what we were taught.
2. Maybe he's overwhelmed with issues and pull requests, and thinks this is too trivial of a matter and doesn't want to encourage this kind of contribution to the project.
3. I can think of about 3-4 other valid reasons, but I won't bore you.
Bottom line, this has all the characteristics of a witch hunt. Joyent is OK with taking away a man's livelihood because he chose not to accept a two-word commit, and one that didn't even deal with code? Not only that, but to publically call him an asshole?
I'm all for making small steps toward gender equality like this one, but calling someone who doesn't share that opinion vulgar names and wanting to fire them is an altogether inappropriate move.
Sexism is not about woman. When we call a country "she" we are making a female description of what a country is: nurturing her citizens. And since there are more and more single fathers we should be allowed to call a nation "he" instead of "she".
I often write in HN with the phrase "but your average uncle joe..." and this is sexist. So one day I will be asked to write "your average auntie Mary" or better yet "your average consumer."
Freedom of press should be honored. If I were an author and I like to write with "he" instead of "they" I should have that freedom. Yes, the project is owned by contributors. So like I said, let other contributors rule him out.
And why do we have sexism in the first place? Because we all assume to have some roles in this society. Today women want the same rights that men do, but there are also rights that men don't get easily (or assume to have less). For example, raping a woman is a big crime but raping a man, have you ever heard of that? Sure. But to some people that's less severe than raping a woman. I am just stating the obvious. In some countries, raping a man is a less severe crime. And law is making a sexist decision.
I believe in people's performance over gender.
All points from either side will draw to the same root cause: we want to be superior. We want to demonstrate that we are superior. We don't really want to be equal, we just want to be superior. If you think about it a moment - that's really where sexism lies. Because there are fewer woman in engineering, we ought to demonstrate our success and ability too.
I have bias, yes, because I am a man. Who doesn't? But I see performance. My sister is very capable and more capable than I am. I always look up to her.
And yes, the solution is to make gender neutral but we are looping between anti-sexist and feminism. There is often a confusion between what a feminist, a sexist or an anti-sexist person would do... We need Yi-Yang logo here.
-- EDIT --
I just thought this is a legitimate question to ask: any difference between an anti-sexist and a feminist? Do feminists prefer gender neutral or do they prefer to have "she" instead?
What we have learnt is that the CEO of Joyent is prone to over-reacting and will fire people over nothing. So don't work for Joyent as there is no job security when you can be fired for a commit.
If you're a Joyent employee and you're not part of the Node.js groupie love-fest, better spend your holiday looking for a new job. Imagine a lunch-time conversation over the Affordable Care Act, would you dare voice your opinion?
To Bryan Cantrill, just because you're the boss doesn't mean you can fire at will, without cause, and ruin a programmer's life, unless that is you like the idea of a lawsuit and getting into the press since literally nobody is talking about Joyent and SmartOS anymore.
Ben's dismissive attitude, and yours, is exactly the issue tech-communities needs to tackle & extinguish. No, sed 's/him/them/' isn't going to suddenly make the world a better place but it's the thought that counts. Every small step counts. Ben's attitude about it, just closing the PR and claiming not to be concerned with trivial matters is something that at least needed a serious HR sensitivity discussion. Firing Ben for it is extreme, but not unreasonable if a company wanted to send a pro-diversity message; albeit extreme. These kinds of actions also provide a good filter for future employees. If you're so bothered by Joyent's blog post that you won't work there and you tell others to quit, it's probably better for Joyent not to have you as an employee to begin with.
+1 on that PR and on Joyent's blog post.
EDIT: Stories about sexism & racism, minor or major, in the tech-scene almost always disappear off HN's front page in like 2 minutes. That's another symptom of a problem as far as I'm concerned.
If we do let Ben be a good man as he claims to be, then maybe it was a stupidity to rule out the ticket so quickly. How would a clever "sexist" person do? This "sexist" person would probably say "well, I don't like they. Not the way my teacher taught me grammar. Rephrase the whole sentence."
Or just don't bother deal with any pull request related to sexist.
But I agree with the parent. The CEO is afraid of any negativity. This is a typical way people handle crisis - find someone responsible and fire that person. A true heroic responsible CEO should first accept / address issue with the PR, then if the community thinks "YES DO IT" then accept the pull request and requires at least 2 contributors with sign off privilege to accept a pull request from that point onward. Firing someone quickly is the worst way to be a boss.
It's completely unreasonable to fire someone over what in essence is reversing a commit. It might warrant a discussion with a manager, it might warrant an official warning, and perhaps some other measure but summary dismissal? No way.
In my opinion, this is Bryan backing Isaacs, perhaps in a clash of egos with Ben, and grand-standing over an issue which he believes will earn Joyent brownie points.
I don't want any developer to work in an environment where the CEO openly boasts about firing people, so in summary, I guess, fuck Joyent.
>> What we have learnt is that the CEO of Joyent is prone to over-reacting and will fire people over nothing.
If you think what took place in that github thread was nothing, you represent exactly the dismissive attitude of sexism the tech-industry needs to get rid of.
A good CEO would ask the relevant manager to sit the two parties down and resolve the situation. If it were not possible, human resources could be brought in to assess the situation and perhaps administer training and/or disciplinary action. A sign of a bad CEO is knee-jerk firing and to write a blog post, boasting about such a hypothetical firing, shows incredibly poor judgement.
Let us imagine though that Bryan was right. So why doesn't Bryan fire Isaacs too? Isaacs broke commit rules by not getting his patch signed... what if this was some other commit which made it into deployment and brought down services for paying customers? Shouldn't Bryan view Isaacs as a bad employee who disregards rules and is thus a dangerous liability to the company?
"@isaacs may have his commit bit but that does not mean he is at liberty to land patches at will. All patches have to be signed off by either me or Bert. Isaac, consider yourself chided." https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d...
The person who committed the offense is the person who should be held responsible. this isn't a matter of opinion or a "cat fight" and your response is exactly why things aren't changing in tech. Most women have encountered a sexist at some point or another, tried to get it fixed and been told to "work it out." How exactly do you "work it out" with someone who is fundamentally convinced your issues are irrelevant?
Oh no, quite the contrary, I'm afraid. They constantly attract large discussions and pointless drama that always gets nowhere. As we are observing right now.
What happened: a maintainer refuses a pull request changing a pronoun in a doc on the grounds of "triviality", without giving more context. Joyent at this stage had two options:
a) reach out to him to stress why they thought it was actually really, really important, or at least get his deeper reasons b) act as if somebody peed in their coffee and write an angry blog post talking about firing people, because Open Source doesn't have enough drama already - it's just missing some more good keywords like Pulseaudio to trigger the best flamewars
It's fascinating to see how supposedly smart people behave with the emotional maturity of a toddler.
Anyway, as of a couple of hours ago, Ben posted this comment on the Github issue:
Hi all, let me try to clear up a few things.
Why I rejected the pull request. Us maintainers tend to reject tiny doc changes because they're often more trouble than they're worth. You have to collect and check the CLA, it makes git blame less effective, etc.
That's why the usual approach to such pull requests is 'no, unless' - in this case the 'unless' should probably have applied. To me as a non-native speaker, the difference between 'him' and 'them' seems academic but hey, if it gets us scores of female contributors, who am I to object?
Why I reverted the commit. In hindsight, I should have given Isaac the benefit of the doubt because I don't doubt that he acted with the best of intentions. On the other hand, if another committer jumped the line like that, I would have done the same thing. We have procedures in place and no one is exempt from them.
To the people that felt it necessary to call me a misogynist: I volunteer in a mentorship program that gets young people - especially young women - involved in technology. How many of you go out and actively try to increase the number of women in the field?
I'm probably going to step back from libuv and node.js core development. I do it more out a sense of duty than anything else. If this is what I have to deal with, then I'd just as rather do something else. Hope that clears things up. Thanks.
Well, thanks Joyent. Hope the extra publicity was worth it.
That is for anything 'controversial' There was a post the other day that found it was any story that has more comments than likes, and atleast 40 comments will be penalized. So, if you want stories like this to last on the front page longer do not comment on them as much.
As for your rape anecdote... I hope you'll give the mechanics of that a bit more thought? And also consider the type of physical injury. (Many rape victims suffer damage to their internal organs and/or lose the ability to conceive.)
If the standards of language are changing, then we have to decide what punishment, if any, we deal out to those who don't keep up quickly enough.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/justice-dept-expands-...
Think before you react.
Comments like,"Don't drop the soap," are so benign in our culture that you would have to be in a hypersensitized environment to be concerned about repercussions of any sort.
How many people feel as if justice is served when a male prisoner is raped to death, à la Jeffrey Dahmer. In fact, many would not call Dahmer's homicide a rape, but switching genders would absolutely qualify it as such.
I'm sounding as if I'm on a soapbox about this, but I'm not defending female rape in any way or the power imbalance of gender in most of the world.
Feminism is about equal rights, don't worry.
"Most women in the United States do not even know or use the terms colonialism and neocolonialism." I found this statement to be emblematic of the issues this book has, it is right around 125 pages of assertions and 0 pages of proof, data, reasoning, or any sort of factual grounding beyond the implicit goals of the author.
"Future feminist studies will document all the ways anti-sexist male parenting enhances the lives of children" This is a second thing the book frequently proposes, while feminism doesn't have an answer today, we're sure we'll have an answer tomorrow.
The book itself had a deceptive title, it should be titled "Feminism is for marxists who claim to have all the answers but hand wave giving any".
This is an example of gender stereotyping.
Though does this have anything to do with culture? I honestly don't know. I use that as an example to ask myself whether sexism is conditional or not. You can use "it" or "she" to refer to a country (or a land if you enjoy poem hahaha), but I supposed most people will not find that sexist. So sexism is condition and has to do with the story (the context in which the pronoun is used).
That means he does care. He cares enough to enforce gendered pronouns in the face of others who prefer neutral pronouns.
For a possible answer to this (admittedly rhetorical) question, please re-read my comment, particularly the lines "...doesn't want to encourage this kind of contribution to the project."
Some developers cleverly attach their name to famous project "Contributors" lists by making small grammar changes to the documentation, and then put it on their CV. In my mind, that's actually not a bad thing, since documentation is improved and everyone benefits. But I can understand that some developers may not think that such recognition is deserved.
He may have reverted because it might have appeared that Isaac was trying to bullishly overrule him in violation of project guidelines (I'm not sure whether that's actually true, but it may have appeared as such).
People who improve the code or documentation, even if it's in some really minor way you don't care about, are vital to any open source project. If you exclude them, you're voting for your project to remain small and irrelevant.
This is a blog post. Taking away a man's livelihood by firing them is widely accepted as perfectly normal and reasonable, and hn posters regularly talk about how they wouldn't want certain people working for them.
You're making a tone argument about calling someone a vulgar name, as if that is somehow worse or more important than them insisting on contributing to the pervasive exclusionary effect of gendered language.
Really, what makes sexism so vital that it needs to be defended?
* Party A submitted a pull request for a minor change to the libuv docs
* Party B (who can signoff on changes) declined it for being an extremely minor change
* Party C merged it after getting signoff from Party D (who can signoff on changes)
* Party B reversed the change under the impression than neither he nor Party D had signed off on it
* Joyent would fire Party B for this
It just so happens that the minor change was removing two masculine pronouns into favour of gender neutral ones.
I can't reconcile the blog post on Joyent with what actually happened.
Blog post [1]:
Ben is not—and if he had been, he wouldn't be as of this morning: to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent.
Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that.
Especially when that poor behavior transcended into the gobsmackingly inappropriate as Ben tried to revert Isaac's commit
@isaacs may have his commit bit but that does not mean he is at liberty to land patches at will. All patches have to be signed off by either me or Bert. Isaac, consider yourself chided.
[1] http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun
[2] https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29538...
[3] https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d...
It's a pretty extreme reaction by Joyent; I wonder how much further away "We would also fire whoever used the gendered pronouns in the first place" is.
When I read the Joyent post, it doesn't seem like they acknowledge any other possible motivation for revert. When I later saw the revert message regarding sign-offs I was quite surprised that the blog neither mentioned it, nor was written in a way that indicated they had read it.
I'd wager that there are less women in IT because of behaviour like Bryan's and a company like Joyent that will host his views than there are because of declined pull requests.
Case in point feminism. Women have put up with a lot over the years and I can understand someone being angry and having the courage of their convictions as a result.
In a way, I respect that. It's their prerogative to try and bring about change. Refusing to enter into dialogue over certain issues will certainly not win anyone over who isn't already on their side, but admitting that things aren't black and white is admitting that they could be wrong.
But mixing take-no-prisoners thinking with the workplace and you can end up with a very poisonous atmosphere. You always need some flexibility of thought, however strong your views, because sooner or later a situation will come up which requires clarification and discussion. Not everything is black and white, and sometimes there are mistakes and misunderstandings. I think the error bars on that github activity are wide enough that we can't be certain.
This blog rant reflects very badly on Joyent. I think it shows that Bryan Cantrill has exceptionally poor judgment. Bryan says "we believe that empathy is a core engineering value". That seems a bit hypocritical given his behaviour.
I mean, there isn't really a whole lot of information from Ben here except two actions, the rejection and then the reversion.
Did he look at the title and think "I should reject a PR titled 'Removed use of gendered pronoun' because the act of removing a gendered pronoun is trivial"? Did he just look at the diff and think "This is a couple of characters, not important." Did he see the change and think "I can't wait to marginalize the shit out of these women reading my documentation!"
There's just not a lot of info from Ben. And now because of all this bluster, there is likely not to be.
Seems like a bunch of drama, rather than a fruitful discussion.
Stating that defending that pronouns should be gendered is a fireable offense is more than just ridiculous political correctness, it's criminalizing opinion. It's the Holy Inquisition.
There should be a law that concerns the confusion of the two.
It is a shame that people have to preface legitimate comparisons to historic events with these sort of disclaimers.
I'm rather amazed to see people rushing to defend sexism. Please tell me: what's so great about sexism? Why is it so wrong to fight it? Because I really don't get it.
This is a witch hunt, plain and simple. I'm amazed that people don't understand that this doesn't help the fight against sexism, at all...
It seems a small thing to fire someone over, but if gender equality and using gender neutral pronouns are important parts of their company policy, then someone actively resisting company policy and reverting the work of people who improved the product according to company policy, would be pretty serious.
Also note that a female developer was ready to quit the community over Ben's behaviour. Ben directly contributed to a hostile atmosphere where an often excluded minority is likely to feel more excluded. That is definitely serious.
You consider it a witch hunt because you don't care about gender neutral pronouns. Probably because you haven't felt subtly excluded all your life by gendered pronouns referring to other people. Fighting that exclusion is an important part of the fight against sexism.
To get a little meta for a moment, I think a lot of the disconnect that happens in these discussions (to, admittedly, stretch the term a bit) comes from the fact that nerds are already deeply familiar with Othering. We know what that shit feels like, man; we've been Othered all our lives.
Consequently, when we see an instance of gender-based Othering that seems trivial to us (witness all this foofaraw over the gender of a pronoun — it's different by three whole letters!), we tend to rank our perception of that triviality over the Othered party's experience. After all, we know what Othering feels like, and saying "him" instead of "them" sure as hell doesn't feel like that. Ipso facto, it can't be Othering, and is therefore just those damned misandrists trying to make trouble again.
But that's exactly the thing you need to understand if you want to approach and engage meaningfully with feminism (in the "women are people, too" sense, which is how it's used by most people): your perceptions of how Othering should feel don't fucking matter if you aren't the party being Othered in that specific circumstance.
Just like an unpopular, male nerd might, in some ways rightly, object to a popular, pretty, smart girl bemoaning being treated differently for being "nerdy", because she's never had the experience of being Othered for her unpopular, male nerdiness, a male nerd can't legitimately claim, "That's nothing!" when presented with a case of gendered, grammatical Othering. He's not the Other there.
So, no, it's not reasonable for a male person to reject a gender-neutralizing pull request on the basis that the gender-based Othering that it's correcting is "trivial". It may seem trivial to him, but he isn't in a position to legitimately judge its triviality. That's not to say it's necessarily a firing offense, but I know I'd, personally, be uncomfortable working with someone who consistently manifests Ben's attitude towards women and gender issues.
This is the exact same attitude that leads to such things as affirmative action and pampering.
You also make the fallacious assumption that all "nerds" (what a vapid and pointless label) have been socially ostracized during their lives, thus begging the question.
Your entire argument basically revolves around accommodating to the feelings of others, consistently. There are cases where this should be taken into account, but it is not a rule of thumb. Sometimes a triviality is a triviality, a ridiculous expectation is a ridiculous expectation.
I think this is the main reason of our present misfortune: we just can't handle getting offended. If we stopped being so emotional about the most minor of annoyances, we'd be much happier. In some ways, technology has contributed to this. We now have too much convenience, and not enough annoyance. It has made us brittle, weak and sensitive.
I don't think it's okay to use the word "gay" pejoratively, even when there aren't any queers in the room. I don't think it's okay to make rape jokes, even when there aren't any women around. I don't think it's okay to behave or speak in a way that is deliberately and hurtfully exclusive of anyone, for any reason, at any time.
To me, being deliberate and mindful about Othering is less about being "accommodating", and more of a useful means to help keep me from being "That Guy" in any of the countless, subtle ways that I might be — because we all do it, even the people you think of as the typically Othered, no matter how hard we try not to.
If you want to call that pampering, that's on you. I call it courtesy and decency, personally.
That's the whole point of an insult.
I don't think it's okay to make rape jokes, even when there aren't any women around.
I don't think you understand how comedy works. In many ways, it's a coping mechanism. The jokes we laugh at are often quite depressing or disturbing if you try to elucidate their underlying subject matter, but they're presented in such a manner that we can be humored by and cope with the dark side of life.
Not making jokes of X type is just censorship and idiocy. Comedy has no boundaries.
I don't think it's okay to behave or speak in a way that is deliberately and hurtfully exclusive of anyone, for any reason, at any time.
I can agree with that, but the way you put it is excessively vague.
There's one practical problem with this approach though. If you start aligning everyone against a single doctrine and prosecute deviations, you'll quickly lose the ability to innovate. Start sending people to jail for having an opinion different from the Central Committee of the Communist Party and you'll end up not only with engineers in jail but with an industry 100% copied from someone else. Ask me how I know.
> The reality is that probably Ben is not a sexist, maybe he believes simply that “him” does not make a difference in sexism. Everybody has his fight, and changing “him” is not the Ben fight
And that's okay. It doesn't have to be Ben's fight. The problem is that Ben denies this fight to others. The problem is not that Ben doesn't work to improve gender equality, the problem is that he rejects and reverts other people's work to improve gender equality.
And I can fully understand that this would be a firing offense in some companies. Rejecting and undoing other people's good work is seriously not cool.
So we should criticize "people who don't accept these commits", or "people who revert commits because of bad process", but the case "people who revert these kind of commits" is not valid.
This is the only way it can change the developer community. Don't be a sexist and you won't run into this problem.
KaoruAoiShiho 0 minutes ago | link
... A lot of people will feel that this firing is an overreaction
Incredibly nitpicky.
What's your solution to this beyond trolling HN?
Gender-specific pronouns are fine for gender-specific use cases. They're not fine if they serve to exclude people using other pronouns for no reason.
And can we please put this into perspective? The language you use reminds me of another GitHub comment suggesting that reverting a commit from they -> him is 'erasing women from the community'.
https://github.com/alex/libuv/commit/3977d1b36c689767cc0db50...
Had nothing to do with using a masculine pronoun, it was to document how the code works.
Hes not a native english speaker either, so you should be glad that he wrote the comment in english for us that don't speak dutch :)
And yet one day one of them pulled me aside and explained to me what exactly I was doing that was making being at her job harder. It wasn't something I did intentionally, it wasn't because I thought ill of her, it was just that I didn't think much at all. I behaved differently toward her (and, I guess, other female developers) because I had a set of assumptions I automatically brought to bear against male developers I wasn't sure applied to her, and it affected my behavior in ways that kept singling her out and making her feel uncomfortable.
One of the most embarassing, humbling and in retrospect, valuable moments in my professional life.
I'm happy it went that way instead of a complaint followed by me losing my job. I think a lot of male developers don't want to be sexist, but we need to learn what that actually means in practice, and it's not as intuitive as you make it out to be. Wasn't for me at least.
My post is vague because it's about subtle behavioral stuff. Basically, when I interacted with male developers, my behavior toward them was based on projecting myself into them automatically. Like, say, the level of expectations I leveled against them, how competitive I would be with them, how aggressive I might be toward them was based on how I myself respond to being challenged and my own career path/experiences and things like that. I unintentionally behaved differently toward female developers (not necessarily worse actually, but differently) just because that automatic projecting would not happen, and it would end up singling them out.
Learning about that has improved my interaction not just with women but also men, actually. I make a much bigger effort to learn about the individual now.
I'm sure all this came a lot easier to others, or maybe they just had the right sort of experiences much earlier (I wonder if it would have helped if I had any siblings, say). But for me is something I can identify as "needed to learn that".
I'm generally not bothered by subtleties, but then I realize that what's subtle to me as a woman is entirely invisible to men.
If the guy prefers masculine pronouns, it doesn't make him a sexist exactly. But it would imply that he doesn't experience the subtle discomfort in his everyday life. So, it's worth pointing out. In a chill way, if possible.
Shouldn't that be "Everybody has their fight"? I guess antirez is sexist. /sarcasm
Of course not. Only men have legitimate fights. When a fight is only being conducted by women, it must be something trivial.
I am spartacus. Or if you prefer, Giles Corey's refusal to plead.
Begin firing people for using "him" instead of "they", and you will "radicalize" many formally apathetic people.
If you're running an open source project and someone you pay is driving off its community, you'd probably feel justified in not giving them money anymore.
Read the actual source, don't rely on editorials.
"God send every one their heart's desire!" - Much Ado About Nothing, Act III Scene 4
"There's not a man I meet but doth salute me, As if I were their well-acquainted friend." - Comedy of Errors, Act IV Scene 3
If I ever release a project, I'm just going to ban all pronouns because of how screwed up pronouns are in English. I'll just use single letters (U for user, P for programmer, etc).
What was the impression on the ground in Sweden?
However, something I've been wondering for a while now is: how does this issue manifest itself in other languages? Are there similar movements? How does it work in languages where every noun has a gender?
(But don't publicly shame us! We're too threatened a species! we're just innocent victims of tradition! Who got this way through our own hard work! Oh no the womenz are attacking!!!!!!!!! Poor us!)
I can't think of a good reason not to accept the pull request. It all seems like such a simple problem getting blown way out of proportion.
To be honest, you'd find a huge discrepancy on this. If this were true, the pull request would not have been rejected.
The patch itself comes across almost as bullying: accept our view, or be publicly shamed as a misogynist.
It is of course good that they want to contribute but some requests generate more traffic around the request than the request itself. Not if this was a bigger improvement to docs, a project wide spelling fix, I would probably be better.
Anyway the reason this go blown up is because of the gender aspect. Ask yourself this, what if this was not influence by the gender and was instead a basic spelling mistake, how would this played out?
http://blog.jooq.org/2013/12/01/the-open-source-bikeshed/
And