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Comment by KaoruAoiShiho | Hacker News Reader

Nice job by Joyent. A lot of people will feel that this firing is an overreaction, but this is how civil rights movements work. You inconvenience the apathetic until they realize that apathy is as unacceptable as anything else.

This is the only way it can change the developer community. Don't be a sexist and you won't run into this problem.

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I hear you, but not being sexist can be pretty hard. I always felt that obviously, I wasn't sexist: I like working with women in the workplace, I always figured we make software for everyone so it's probably best if everyone makes software, and so on. I've been fortunate to have female co-workers who I felt made terrific colleagues, both skills-wise and socially.

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.

I read a study once that said people who think they have no bias are the most behaviorally biased people of all.

for the benefit of others could you outline what "set of assumptions" might get people fired? your post is incredibly vague...

Sorry - I wasn't saying that I'm sure I did something I would have gotten fired over, the point was more that I don't think just any instance of sexism should be treated as a fireable offense, because sexist behavior can be unintentional and due to lack of experience. "Don't be sexist and you won't have problems" as the OP put is what I thought I was doing, but wasn't.

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".

Oh please. No one was sexist here. A diff of 3 characters on something wholly non-code or operations-related is hardly a change that requires attention.

He deliberately made the pronoun masculine for no apparent reason other than to stick it in women's eyes.

So here's the problem. English doesn't have a gender-neutral pronoun that refers to a single person. So you have to pick "he" or "she". If you switch it around every sentence, the text is hard to follow. If you pick one and use it for the entire text, you're sexist.

What's your solution to this beyond trolling HN?

Singular 'they' has been a thing for centuries.

And it's sucked for centuries. If it were clearly better, the gender-specific pronouns would be gone, right?

Just-world fallacy much?

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.

No, not right, because sometimes when people try to use it they get resistance like you see in the commit.

Why not assume the best of your fellow developers, instead of assuming the worst? Here is an interpretation that has nothing to do with "sticking it in women's eyes": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6825193

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'.

No he didn't. He reversed a commit that didn't follow standard procedures.

Except it did, he just didn't know, and this whole thing could have been avoided if he had signed it off himself in the first place instead of calling it trivial.

You should probably go back and read his commit message before making assumptions.

This is from a commit he did over a year ago:

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 :)

    KaoruAoiShiho 0 minutes ago | link
    ... A lot of people will feel that this firing is an overreaction

No one was fired.

The statement of intent to fire if firing was possible?

Incredibly nitpicky.

Yup, exactly. That's how computer software industry transforms into civil rights movement. I guess we developed all possible softwares on earth and need no industry anymore.

Please stop devaluing the term sexism.

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