Today Joyent wrote a blog post in the company blog about an issue that started with this pull request in the libuv project: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29538615 Basically the developer Ben Noordhuis rejected a pull request involving a change in the documentation to use gender-neutral form instead of “him”. Joyent replied with this incredible post: http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun. In the blog post you can read: “But while Isaac is a Joyent employee, 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.” A few lines later you can read: “Indeed, one of the challenges of an open source project that depends on volunteer effort isdealing with assholes” Maybe Joyent is thinking something like, you can’t go wrong if you fight sexism, or something like that, as I can’t believe they had a so naive reaction. Really, we have 10k years of culture for a reason, to be able to discriminate more than that, it is not 2+2=4. Probably Ben is not a sexist, maybe he believes simply that “him” does not make a difference in sexism every day. Everybody has his fight, and changing “him” in not the Ben fight, but possibly when Ben will have to evaluate a female candidate, he will use a truly meritocratic meter and WILL NOT GIVE A FUCK about the gender, like he did when refusing the pull request. You can’t bash people that don’t have your vision, and you can’t think that the fight against sexism is a free pass. Joyent, you are liable of your actions, and your actions violate more fundamental civil rights than you think. But the most disturbing thing is that companies act like that because of fear, the fear of the reaction of people that believe that the world is black or white, and that if you don’t see it the same color they see it, you are to blame, you are to crucify.