> If Ben can’t learn, we’ll fire him. [Edit: See comment below. This is not meant literally.]
Your correction doesn't make the statement much better. This whole debate is about how words matter, and yet your words put him on notice in a public place. All of Ben's friends now know his employer will fire him if he "can't learn." Is he so stubbornly misogynistic that that should be in question?
You could have conveyed the same message by saying "he was following the commit rules, no offense intended, won't happen again" and left it at that.
And please don't tell me you didn't mean it literally. If you're joking or bluffing about firing someone, it's going to make you look even worse.
Don't you remember how everyone viewed that AOL CEO who fired someone in public a few months back? Well, please understand that people view this public threatening of firing in exactly the same way.
For what it's worth, I completely agree with the pull request. But you all couldn't have possibly handled this any worse.
Then you shouldn't have wrote it because most people and every reporter are going to take it literally.
Since pronouns are an issue that you want the node.js community to be correct about, would words with significance in certain cultures also be high on your priority list?