8 ms·

The fight against sexism is not a free pass

69 points by jodal 13y ago

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
seiji 13y ago
Do we know if it was more than what the commit said? The reverse said it was a policy violation to have him commit it directly. It didn't actually say anything about being a he-man-woman-hater.
taspeotis 13y ago
When the original blog post showed up on HN, I couldn't understand why it was penned. As best I could tell, here's what happened: * 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. The pull request wasn't rejected on any pronoun principle [2]: Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that. And again: Especially when that poor behavior transcended into the gobsmackingly inappropriate as Ben tried to revert Isaac's commit The actual commit message [3]: @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. Unless bnoordhuis was aware the patch had been signed off on (in which case reversing the commit is a dick move), all he's doing is following procedures. [1] http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun [2] https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29538615 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29538... [3] https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482dcc8d1c41c14333fcb48 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d...
- waterlion 13y ago
  That requires far too much, and far too nuanced thought. BURN THE WITCH.
  - moocowduckquack 13y ago
    No, no, no. This requires careful and measured thought before passing judgement. Bring me a duck and I shall fetch my largest scales.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  Minor detail: your summation makes it sound like Joyent would fire over reversing a change, when in fact Joyent appears to be saying they would fire over reversing the change because the change was removing two masculine pronouns. 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.
  - forgottenpass 13y ago
    Minor detail: It was misleading in the Joyent blog post, the fact that it also reads as misleading in the parent post isn't the poster's fault. 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.
    - sliverstorm 13y ago
      I'm confused as to what exactly you are saying, but I wasn't assigning fault to my parent.
      - forgottenpass 13y ago
        I'm not saying you were. Just saying that not only is that a fire-able offense to Joylet, their post heavily implies that to be the motivation for the revert.
KaoruAoiShiho 13y ago
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.
- taspeotis 13y ago
  KaoruAoiShiho 0 minutes ago | link ... A lot of people will feel that this firing is an overreaction No one was fired.
  - KaoruAoiShiho 13y ago
    The statement of intent to fire if firing was possible? Incredibly nitpicky.
- goldenkey 13y ago
  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.
  - KaoruAoiShiho 13y ago
    He deliberately made the pronoun masculine for no apparent reason other than to stick it in women's eyes.
    - jrockway 13y ago
      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?
      - 13y ago
moocowduckquack 13y ago
We'll run out of tar and feathers at this rate.
- ben0x539 13y ago
  I kind of hoped we'd run out of sexists first.
  - moocowduckquack 13y ago
    Probably not, which is why it is vitally important to choose battles well. This situation seems to be being sorted reasonably well without the incursion of a baying horde looking for the guys head, or Joyent's head for that matter.
  - Crito 13y ago
    Cast your net wide enough, and you will find that at a certain point some people will perceive an injustice and will begin turning themselves 'into' sexists, just to spite you. 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.
    - ben0x539 13y ago
      Hey, no one's getting angry because someone wrote 'him' instead of 'they' in the docs. The issue is that someone inisted that this must not be changed, for no good reason, pointlessly antagonizing lots of 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.
      - Crito 13y ago
        > for no good reason, pointlessly antagonizing lots of people. Read the actual source, don't rely on editorials.
CrLf 13y ago
I'm sorry to invoke Godwin's law on this, but this is beyond absurd... 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.
- rjknight 13y ago
  You can only invoke Godwin's law after someone else draws a comparison to the Nazis. You cannot invoke it on yourself prior to drawing a comparison to the Holy Inquisition, no matter how far beyond absurdity the situation may be.
  - clarkm 13y ago
    He probably just confused it with Poe's Law. There should be a law that concerns the confusion of the two.
  - kevrone 13y ago
    I didn't expect to find humor in this thread, but here I am, laughing. So that's nice.
  - Crito 13y ago
    The shrill objections that people raise when people draw parallels between things in history that are not strictly equal in all respects ("Do you really think this is equivalent to torturing people for being jewish?!?") are the same. It is a shame that people have to preface legitimate comparisons to historic events with these sort of disclaimers.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- mcv 13y ago
  It's not criminalizing anything. It's pointing out that it goes against that company's policy. Is it really so bad for a company to have a policy to prefer gender equality? 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.
trekky1700 13y ago
Things that are obvious: 1. Gender neutral language is obviously and undoubtedly preferable. 2. The changes would have been incredibly easy to implement, the work was already done. 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.
- yeukhon 13y ago
  > 1. Gender neutral language is obviously and undoubtedly preferable. To be honest, you'd find a huge discrepancy on this. If this were true, the pull request would not have been rejected.
- overgard 13y ago
  There's a more subtle issue at play: accepting the pull request could be seen as "admitting" that the original phrasing was offensive. Perhaps they didn't want to do so because they disagreed with the premise. Accepting the patch isn't a neutral action, it also means implicitly accepting a certain world view. The patch itself comes across almost as bullying: accept our view, or be publicly shamed as a misogynist.
  - trekky1700 13y ago
    I wouldn't even call it offensive. I don't get where that's even coming from. It's not offensive, it's just simply incorrect phrasing. It's poor English if you will.
- rdtsc 13y ago
  One reason I can think of -- some people make small grammar and spelling changes just to get their name in the commit authors lists and in the THANKS file. Hey look, "contributer to the famous Node.JS project" on the resume. 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?
clarkm 13y ago
Ok, even though I think the singular they is awkward, I can understand the fight for removing gendered pronouns. 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?
- fhars 13y ago
  Badly. I've always envied english for its almost complete lack of grammatical gender.
- kika 13y ago
  Miserably if you apply the same rules. But I can't imagine a Russian female software developer being offended by Russian "he" in the documentation. Every occupation has a gender too and 'software developer' is 'male', though you can produce the female gender from this word, but in looks very awkward in the text - if you use 'femalized' words it means you actually make a point. We also have 'neutral' gender (like "it" in English), but you usually can't use it instead of male or female unless you're writing satire :-) There're even different female forms for 'male' occupations depending on whether the female is the professional or wife of the professional. So all the documentation I can think of uses the 'default' gender which is usually male. And I'm yet to see someone offended by that, male or female.
makomk 13y ago
So far as I can tell, it's a fundamental of all forms of feminism (though especially radical feminism) that yes, everyone must make fighting sexism and supporting feminism their #1 priority, over and above the actual goals of whatever businesses or groups they're involved in, and that anyone who doesn't is a women hater. You get stuff like Atheism+, where a bunch of feminist activists went into the atheist movement and declared that from then on, it must revolve entirely around their form of feminism, and that it didn't even matter if members were actually atheists so long as they supported that kind of feminism. Radical/non-intersectional feminists even tried to do the same to groups fighting against other forms of discrimination such as racism and homophobia.
- logjam 13y ago
  Overgeneralize much?
  - makomk 13y ago
    Not really. So far as I can tell, anyone who disagrees with these tactics is publicly shamed as a misogynist by influential feminists and isn't welcome, even if they're a woman and even if they agree with the end goal. It's pretty easy to make generalizations about a political movement when anyone who those generalizations wouldn't apply to is effectively driven out of the movement.
- ben0x539 13y ago
  What does this whole thing have to do with radical feminism?
- mcv 13y ago
  No, not everybody has to fight sexism, just don't defend sexism when others fight it. Really, what makes sexism so vital that it needs to be defended?
  - makomk 13y ago
    Errrm, sexism certainly doesn't need defending. Unfortunately, as we've seen here anything that gets in the way of feminist activism gets portrayed as defending sexism. For instance, reverting feminist commits for not having the proper sign-off? Totally sexist.
olalonde 13y ago
> Everybody has his fight Shouldn't that be "Everybody has their fight"? I guess antirez is sexist. /sarcasm
- mcv 13y ago
  > Shouldn't that be "Everybody has their fight"? Of course not. Only men have legitimate fights. When a fight is only being conducted by women, it must be something trivial.
peter2012 13y ago
http://images.sodahead.com/polls/001175517/0cb3ef6e1d30edc0038eaa58f90b507c_xlarge.jpeg http://images.sodahead.com/polls/001175517/0cb3ef6e1d30edc00...
- ben0x539 13y ago
  You might be missing the bigger picture of witch hunts and the feminist movement if you're trying to draw parallels like that.
stephp 13y ago
I definitely wouldn't have reacted if I was personally involved in this. However, I do think it's worth pointing out how masculine pronouns can wear a girl down over time / create general awkwardness (ie: Send your "web guy" over). 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.
jnbiche 13y ago
Oh dear God. This is what we've sunk to? Saying we'd love to fire some "asshole" because he chose not to pull a pull request changing two instances of "him" to "they"? 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.
- yeukhon 13y ago
  I am just afraid there is going to be a retaliation against Ben. Remember what happened early this year at PyCon? Honestly, people need to stop acting like animals and stop bash him out. There are other contributors who can rule him out and we don't need those hash comments. 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?
jrockway 13y ago
Gender neutral pronouns suck in English. Fix that before you start firing people over not using them.
- stephp 13y ago
  Truth. I figured after Facebook started using "they" in a singular sense that the grammar rules would change. They have only unofficially.
  - moocowduckquack 13y ago
    They or their as singular has been part of recognised English for a very long time. "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
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - jrockway 13y ago
      That's a fair point, and "they" certainly does work well in some places. But if you took every use of "he" or "she" from Shakespeare and replaced it with "they", then we'd have a problem. And that's what this post is hinting at doing.
      - pessimizer 13y ago
        It's harder to write non-gendered stuff in English than to write gendered stuff, but I'm sure Shakespeare would have been pretty easily up to the job if he had cared.
      - tree_of_item 13y ago
        Running `s/he/they` on Shakespeare's current literature would fail, but why is that a problem? Don't you think Shakespeare could have made it work from the beginning if that was a big issue at the time?
mcv 13y ago
This article misses the point. Before it goes on to speculate about hypothetical situations, it says: > 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.
- riffraff 13y ago
  but apparently ben didn't revert the commit on the basis of its content, he reverted it on the basis of a bad process (lack of review). 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.
  - ben0x539 13y ago
    He initially rejected it on the basis of its content, and then reverted it on a basis that didn't hold up to scrutiny, as one the first comments on the revert commit demonstrates. Seems like that meets both your criteria?
luziphir 13y ago
If you actually look at the joyent blog post and the github commits its pretty obvious Ben was a dismissive prick with a bit of an agenda since this goes beyond just not accepting a pull request. I think firing someone over this would probably be a bit much but he definitely deserves to be called out for being a jackass.
- ben0x539 13y ago
  If I was a company that was represented on github by someone who managed to antagonize the community I was hoping to be working with on my open source product, I'd probably fire them too and hire someone with better qualifications re: getting along with people.
kika 13y ago
<sarcasm>"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" - nice place to work, congrats Joyent employees.</sarcasm> 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.
- ben0x539 13y ago
  Good thing nothing like that is happening or likely to happen, then, just good old social repercurssions for bad behavior.
rosser 13y ago
It is so incredibly, profoundly frustrating to watch (mostly) male nerds grapple with sexism. Guys (and I mean that specifically and gendered-ly), you don't get it. You kinda can't, and I say that as a cis male person. I don't get it, either, except maybe intellectually, and even then only occasionally. 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.
- vezzy-fnord 13y ago
  your perceptions of how Othering should feel don't fucking matter if you aren't the party being Othered in that specific circumstance. 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.
im3w1l 13y ago
Is there a scientific basis for wanting to remove gendered pronouns?
- ben0x539 13y ago
  Is there a scientific basis for insisting on gendered pronouns if there's no shortage of people telling you that they're offputting and exclusionary?
  - thescribe 13y ago
    If we did whatever 'people told us' we wouldn't do anything, this alone isn't a reason for action.
NhanH 13y ago
Out of sheer curiosity, since the Joyent's blog post had such a big emphasis on "empathy", but wouldn't sociopaths/ psychopaths be even more likely to be not sexists? Because they would be an assholes to everyone anyway, regardless of gender :-). (I'm sorry, this is probably really wrong to be joking with, it's just that the whole situation is completely bizarre and incomprehensible to me, so weird questions just pop up).
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- Crito 13y ago
  A clever psychopath can put on the mask of an empathetic person when it suits them. Think Ted Bundy as an extreme case (of course most psychopaths/sociopaths/whatever are not serial killers).
lukaseder 13y ago
This is yet another display of people discussing the bikeshed: http://blog.jooq.org/2013/12/01/the-open-source-bikeshed/ http://blog.jooq.org/2013/12/01/the-open-source-bikeshed/ And http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law_of_triviality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law_of_triviality
melindajb 13y ago
Never mind those generations of discrimination. We men will tell you what is an acceptable commit and that's that. Offended? Tough luck. We run the world! It's a meritocracy don'tchaknow??!! (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!)

69 points by jodal 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

seiji 13y ago

Do we know if it was more than what the commit said? The reverse said it was a policy violation to have him commit it directly. It didn't actually say anything about being a he-man-woman-hater.

taspeotis 13y ago

When the original blog post showed up on HN, I couldn't understand why it was penned. As best I could tell, here's what happened: * 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. The pull request wasn't rejected on any pronoun principle [2]: Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that. And again: Especially when that poor behavior transcended into the gobsmackingly inappropriate as Ben tried to revert Isaac's commit The actual commit message [3]: @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. Unless bnoordhuis was aware the patch had been signed off on (in which case reversing the commit is a dick move), all he's doing is following procedures. [1] http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun [2] https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29538615 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29538... [3] https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482dcc8d1c41c14333fcb48 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d...

waterlion 13y ago
That requires far too much, and far too nuanced thought. BURN THE WITCH.
- moocowduckquack 13y ago
  No, no, no. This requires careful and measured thought before passing judgement. Bring me a duck and I shall fetch my largest scales.
sliverstorm 13y ago
Minor detail: your summation makes it sound like Joyent would fire over reversing a change, when in fact Joyent appears to be saying they would fire over reversing the change because the change was removing two masculine pronouns. 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.
- forgottenpass 13y ago
  Minor detail: It was misleading in the Joyent blog post, the fact that it also reads as misleading in the parent post isn't the poster's fault. 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.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    I'm confused as to what exactly you are saying, but I wasn't assigning fault to my parent.
    - forgottenpass 13y ago
      I'm not saying you were. Just saying that not only is that a fire-able offense to Joylet, their post heavily implies that to be the motivation for the revert.

KaoruAoiShiho 13y ago

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.

taspeotis 13y ago
KaoruAoiShiho 0 minutes ago | link ... A lot of people will feel that this firing is an overreaction No one was fired.
- KaoruAoiShiho 13y ago
  The statement of intent to fire if firing was possible? Incredibly nitpicky.
goldenkey 13y ago
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.
- KaoruAoiShiho 13y ago
  He deliberately made the pronoun masculine for no apparent reason other than to stick it in women's eyes.
  - jrockway 13y ago
    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?
    - 13y ago

moocowduckquack 13y ago

We'll run out of tar and feathers at this rate.

ben0x539 13y ago
I kind of hoped we'd run out of sexists first.
- moocowduckquack 13y ago
  Probably not, which is why it is vitally important to choose battles well. This situation seems to be being sorted reasonably well without the incursion of a baying horde looking for the guys head, or Joyent's head for that matter.
- Crito 13y ago
  Cast your net wide enough, and you will find that at a certain point some people will perceive an injustice and will begin turning themselves 'into' sexists, just to spite you. 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.
  - ben0x539 13y ago
    Hey, no one's getting angry because someone wrote 'him' instead of 'they' in the docs. The issue is that someone inisted that this must not be changed, for no good reason, pointlessly antagonizing lots of 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.
    - Crito 13y ago
      > for no good reason, pointlessly antagonizing lots of people. Read the actual source, don't rely on editorials.

CrLf 13y ago

I'm sorry to invoke Godwin's law on this, but this is beyond absurd... 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.

rjknight 13y ago
You can only invoke Godwin's law after someone else draws a comparison to the Nazis. You cannot invoke it on yourself prior to drawing a comparison to the Holy Inquisition, no matter how far beyond absurdity the situation may be.
- clarkm 13y ago
  He probably just confused it with Poe's Law. There should be a law that concerns the confusion of the two.
- kevrone 13y ago
  I didn't expect to find humor in this thread, but here I am, laughing. So that's nice.
- Crito 13y ago
  The shrill objections that people raise when people draw parallels between things in history that are not strictly equal in all respects ("Do you really think this is equivalent to torturing people for being jewish?!?") are the same. It is a shame that people have to preface legitimate comparisons to historic events with these sort of disclaimers.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
mcv 13y ago
It's not criminalizing anything. It's pointing out that it goes against that company's policy. Is it really so bad for a company to have a policy to prefer gender equality? 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.

trekky1700 13y ago

Things that are obvious: 1. Gender neutral language is obviously and undoubtedly preferable. 2. The changes would have been incredibly easy to implement, the work was already done. 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.

yeukhon 13y ago
> 1. Gender neutral language is obviously and undoubtedly preferable. To be honest, you'd find a huge discrepancy on this. If this were true, the pull request would not have been rejected.
overgard 13y ago
There's a more subtle issue at play: accepting the pull request could be seen as "admitting" that the original phrasing was offensive. Perhaps they didn't want to do so because they disagreed with the premise. Accepting the patch isn't a neutral action, it also means implicitly accepting a certain world view. The patch itself comes across almost as bullying: accept our view, or be publicly shamed as a misogynist.
- trekky1700 13y ago
  I wouldn't even call it offensive. I don't get where that's even coming from. It's not offensive, it's just simply incorrect phrasing. It's poor English if you will.
rdtsc 13y ago
One reason I can think of -- some people make small grammar and spelling changes just to get their name in the commit authors lists and in the THANKS file. Hey look, "contributer to the famous Node.JS project" on the resume. 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?

clarkm 13y ago

Ok, even though I think the singular they is awkward, I can understand the fight for removing gendered pronouns. 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?

fhars 13y ago
Badly. I've always envied english for its almost complete lack of grammatical gender.
kika 13y ago
Miserably if you apply the same rules. But I can't imagine a Russian female software developer being offended by Russian "he" in the documentation. Every occupation has a gender too and 'software developer' is 'male', though you can produce the female gender from this word, but in looks very awkward in the text - if you use 'femalized' words it means you actually make a point. We also have 'neutral' gender (like "it" in English), but you usually can't use it instead of male or female unless you're writing satire :-) There're even different female forms for 'male' occupations depending on whether the female is the professional or wife of the professional. So all the documentation I can think of uses the 'default' gender which is usually male. And I'm yet to see someone offended by that, male or female.

makomk 13y ago

So far as I can tell, it's a fundamental of all forms of feminism (though especially radical feminism) that yes, everyone must make fighting sexism and supporting feminism their #1 priority, over and above the actual goals of whatever businesses or groups they're involved in, and that anyone who doesn't is a women hater. You get stuff like Atheism+, where a bunch of feminist activists went into the atheist movement and declared that from then on, it must revolve entirely around their form of feminism, and that it didn't even matter if members were actually atheists so long as they supported that kind of feminism. Radical/non-intersectional feminists even tried to do the same to groups fighting against other forms of discrimination such as racism and homophobia.

logjam 13y ago
Overgeneralize much?
- makomk 13y ago
  Not really. So far as I can tell, anyone who disagrees with these tactics is publicly shamed as a misogynist by influential feminists and isn't welcome, even if they're a woman and even if they agree with the end goal. It's pretty easy to make generalizations about a political movement when anyone who those generalizations wouldn't apply to is effectively driven out of the movement.
ben0x539 13y ago
What does this whole thing have to do with radical feminism?
mcv 13y ago
No, not everybody has to fight sexism, just don't defend sexism when others fight it. Really, what makes sexism so vital that it needs to be defended?
- makomk 13y ago
  Errrm, sexism certainly doesn't need defending. Unfortunately, as we've seen here anything that gets in the way of feminist activism gets portrayed as defending sexism. For instance, reverting feminist commits for not having the proper sign-off? Totally sexist.

olalonde 13y ago

> Everybody has his fight Shouldn't that be "Everybody has their fight"? I guess antirez is sexist. /sarcasm

mcv 13y ago
> Shouldn't that be "Everybody has their fight"? Of course not. Only men have legitimate fights. When a fight is only being conducted by women, it must be something trivial.

peter2012 13y ago

http://images.sodahead.com/polls/001175517/0cb3ef6e1d30edc0038eaa58f90b507c_xlarge.jpeg http://images.sodahead.com/polls/001175517/0cb3ef6e1d30edc00...

ben0x539 13y ago
You might be missing the bigger picture of witch hunts and the feminist movement if you're trying to draw parallels like that.

stephp 13y ago

I definitely wouldn't have reacted if I was personally involved in this. However, I do think it's worth pointing out how masculine pronouns can wear a girl down over time / create general awkwardness (ie: Send your "web guy" over). 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.

jnbiche 13y ago

Oh dear God. This is what we've sunk to? Saying we'd love to fire some "asshole" because he chose not to pull a pull request changing two instances of "him" to "they"? 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.

yeukhon 13y ago
I am just afraid there is going to be a retaliation against Ben. Remember what happened early this year at PyCon? Honestly, people need to stop acting like animals and stop bash him out. There are other contributors who can rule him out and we don't need those hash comments. 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?

jrockway 13y ago

Gender neutral pronouns suck in English. Fix that before you start firing people over not using them.

stephp 13y ago
Truth. I figured after Facebook started using "they" in a singular sense that the grammar rules would change. They have only unofficially.
- moocowduckquack 13y ago
  They or their as singular has been part of recognised English for a very long time. "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
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - jrockway 13y ago
    That's a fair point, and "they" certainly does work well in some places. But if you took every use of "he" or "she" from Shakespeare and replaced it with "they", then we'd have a problem. And that's what this post is hinting at doing.
    - pessimizer 13y ago
      It's harder to write non-gendered stuff in English than to write gendered stuff, but I'm sure Shakespeare would have been pretty easily up to the job if he had cared.
    - tree_of_item 13y ago
      Running `s/he/they` on Shakespeare's current literature would fail, but why is that a problem? Don't you think Shakespeare could have made it work from the beginning if that was a big issue at the time?

mcv 13y ago

This article misses the point. Before it goes on to speculate about hypothetical situations, it says: > 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.

riffraff 13y ago
but apparently ben didn't revert the commit on the basis of its content, he reverted it on the basis of a bad process (lack of review). 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.
- ben0x539 13y ago
  He initially rejected it on the basis of its content, and then reverted it on a basis that didn't hold up to scrutiny, as one the first comments on the revert commit demonstrates. Seems like that meets both your criteria?

luziphir 13y ago

If you actually look at the joyent blog post and the github commits its pretty obvious Ben was a dismissive prick with a bit of an agenda since this goes beyond just not accepting a pull request. I think firing someone over this would probably be a bit much but he definitely deserves to be called out for being a jackass.

ben0x539 13y ago
If I was a company that was represented on github by someone who managed to antagonize the community I was hoping to be working with on my open source product, I'd probably fire them too and hire someone with better qualifications re: getting along with people.

kika 13y ago

<sarcasm>"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" - nice place to work, congrats Joyent employees.</sarcasm> 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.

ben0x539 13y ago
Good thing nothing like that is happening or likely to happen, then, just good old social repercurssions for bad behavior.

rosser 13y ago

It is so incredibly, profoundly frustrating to watch (mostly) male nerds grapple with sexism. Guys (and I mean that specifically and gendered-ly), you don't get it. You kinda can't, and I say that as a cis male person. I don't get it, either, except maybe intellectually, and even then only occasionally. 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.

vezzy-fnord 13y ago
your perceptions of how Othering should feel don't fucking matter if you aren't the party being Othered in that specific circumstance. 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.

im3w1l 13y ago

Is there a scientific basis for wanting to remove gendered pronouns?

ben0x539 13y ago
Is there a scientific basis for insisting on gendered pronouns if there's no shortage of people telling you that they're offputting and exclusionary?
- thescribe 13y ago
  If we did whatever 'people told us' we wouldn't do anything, this alone isn't a reason for action.

NhanH 13y ago

Out of sheer curiosity, since the Joyent's blog post had such a big emphasis on "empathy", but wouldn't sociopaths/ psychopaths be even more likely to be not sexists? Because they would be an assholes to everyone anyway, regardless of gender :-). (I'm sorry, this is probably really wrong to be joking with, it's just that the whole situation is completely bizarre and incomprehensible to me, so weird questions just pop up).

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
Crito 13y ago
A clever psychopath can put on the mask of an empathetic person when it suits them. Think Ted Bundy as an extreme case (of course most psychopaths/sociopaths/whatever are not serial killers).

lukaseder 13y ago

This is yet another display of people discussing the bikeshed: http://blog.jooq.org/2013/12/01/the-open-source-bikeshed/ http://blog.jooq.org/2013/12/01/the-open-source-bikeshed/ And http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law_of_triviality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law_of_triviality

melindajb 13y ago

Never mind those generations of discrimination. We men will tell you what is an acceptable commit and that's that. Offended? Tough luck. We run the world! It's a meritocracy don'tchaknow??!! (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!)