[aquadrop]

Did actually any women complain? Cause all I saw was bunch of guys arguing about how awful it is to use gender pronouns. I wouldn't care if all examples were written with "her". Cause that's absolutely unimportant. As I understand there's more serious, real issues with gender equality, like: salary difference, not promoting women, entering barrier, etc. Not damn "he" in doc examples. And as Ben mentioned he actually do some real things: 'I volunteer in a mentorship program that gets young people - especially young women - involved in technology.' Too bad they all didn't talked it over privately in the very beginning and resolved the issue. That retaliation post by Bryan Cantrill only hurts Joyent's reputation in my eyes.

[WhaleBiologist]

Sadly this is the exact behaviour I have come to expect from these types of people.

Rather than actively work towards fixing the big issues in gender inequality (which requires society as a whole to change, and consequently will take decades of slow improvement), they choose to take the easy route and fill themselves with self-righteous indignation over an open source maintainer who reverted a commit for a trivial documentation change that he thought violated commit procedures. Obviously he is a rampant misogynist and needs to be crucified.

The real irony here is that the people with the pitchforks are generally more sexist than those they choose to lambast, seeing as they feel so compelled to defend poor defenseless women from all aggressors (real and imagined).

[ravisarma]

To answer your question: Yes. https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d... (please scroll).

However, that's not a necessary criteria. Substitute "he" for some other term, say "white person", and I doubt you'll see the need for a specific member of the excluded segment to speak up.

The real argument is around the second part of your comment. Which can be recast as whether male as the default gender, when used in texts, is a matter of concern for the development/opportunities of women. I think so. Along with salary differences, etc. We do not have to reach to Simone de Beauvoir to make that point... here is a link to a current analysis/view: http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/gender-sensitive-langu....

Quote:

> Moreover, these issues are important for people concerned about issues of social inequality. There is a relationship between our language use and our social reality. If we “erase” women from language, that makes it easier to maintain gender inequality. As Professor Sherryl Kleinman (2000:6) has argued, > > [M]ale-based generics are another indicator—and, more importantly, a reinforcer—of a system in which “man” in the abstract and men in the flesh are privileged over women. > > Words matter, and our language choices have consequences. If we believe that women and men deserve social equality, then we should think seriously about how to reflect that belief in our language use.