I think #2 happened because Alex (the creator of the PR) was being hostile in his comments. I doubt Ben would have closed this PR if Alex would have approached

I think #2 happened because Alex (the creator of the PR) was being hostile in his comments. I doubt Ben would have closed this PR if Alex would have approached the subject with more poise and kindness. Not everyone is familiar with the battle of gender inequality in tech and the fact that some people find gendered pronouns exclusionary. This was a perfect time to help the cause and educate developers, but instead Alex chose to be hostile because they didn't understand. This is the comment I believe hurt everything the PR was trying to do: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29537035 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29537... We need to remember that the Internet is a global community and not everyone we deal with has english as a first language, Ben being from The Netherlands most likely speaks dutch first which has its own gender language issues: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Dutch_grammar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Dutch_grammar