Sexism Isn't Simple

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, a controversy arose over a a pull request removing gendered pronouns in documentation for libuv. The original patch was rejected by one maintainer for the project, then accepted by another one, and in a classic case of miscommunication, reverted by the maintainer who rejected it. The matter got Joyent's attention, resulting in a blog saying that it considered the behavior firable, which in turn got antirez, the developer of Redis and an open source programmer I respect, to blog and get on twitter complaining that the maintainers are the real victims.

That post disappointed me a lot. It's the kind of post that makes me think "I'd be better off playing a video game than spending the time writing a patch". I know that it can be hard for maintainers to deal with some kinds of trivial changes, but in my mind the onus is on people in the position to accept or reject code to especially careful and polite about how they treat contributors. Whether or not this incident displayed sexism, it certainly displayed a kind of rudeness that's familiar to a lot of folks who use and support open source projects.

I'm one of the people it keeps away. Every time I look at an open source project and think of something I could do to make it better, I start to feel sick because I think that my contributions will be too minor or too pointless to be worth merging. Every time I look at an open source project and see exclusionary documentation I could fix, I pass on it because I think about all the complaints I see on Hacker News about being gender-neutral being oppressive. This is stuff that matters to me, that affects me and my friends, and in many ways, ought to be the kind of thing I'm comfortable working on. But too often it feels like dealing with this will just result in dealing with long arguments and disparaging comments.

I agree with some of what antirez said: sexism is not an issue that is easily or trivially reduced to what is right or wrong. I believe sexism is a systemic issue. Like homophobia or racism, it's not something that is only expressed by individuals in individual incidents. It adds up over time, from the acts of commission by malicious people, from acts of ignorance by people who don't know better, and from acts of omission from people who might otherwise think themselves free of bias. That process is complicated, and many of us who generally think of ourselves as decent people are sometimes part of it.

I don't know the people involved in the original thread. I don't know their motivations. I don't know if their actions or opinions were worth firing people over. But I do know that "correcting" their opinions is not sufficient for actually dealing with the problems of sexism and exclusion in tech. I believe that the behavior on display in the pull request's thread shows a toxic combination of an unwelcoming attitude and a community that can only express itself through argument. Comments that the real victims of sexism in tech are people who aren't sufficiently "politically correct"¹ only things contribute to an atmosphere in the tech and open source communities that keep people away.

I think there's a failure of representation in tech and especially open source contributors. I know that I'm part of the problem on the supply side: I ought to be sending in more contributions and participating rather than quietly patching things for myself when I run into problems. But I think there's a need for projects to pay closer attention to the environments they create.

Changing the atmosphere will be tricky. There's a history of abrasive, don't bother me, RTFM attitudes that need to be overcome. But being polite and welcoming can help. It doesn't cost much, and it's a positive first step.