We can do better.

my perspective.md

I'm very saddened by what happened recently on github and twitter regarding s/he/they/ in a comment deep inside libuv.

First I want to make it clear that I understand there is a real problem in the world where women feel like they don't have a fair chance in tech fields. Women in tech really do get death and rape threats from some men when they speak out on this issue. Our society and media objectify women and this sickens me. On the bright side, I had never seen this happen among the people I call friends.

Using "he" and "his" in technical documentation to reference the developer is poor English and makes some women feel a little more excluded. It reminds them that most programmers are men. It reminds them that some assume all developers are men for practical purposes.

A helpful developer noticed that a comment deep inside libuv (not actual documentation) could be improved by changing the language slightly. They bothered to file a CLA and ask for the proper procedure to get it in. There was nothing wrong with this.

Now let's look at this from Ben's perspective:

• Ben is one of the most active contributors (if not most active) to libuv. Node.JS would not be what it is today without his contributions. He's a very technical engineer who continues to work on the community project out of a feeling of duty. He doesn't have to do this.
• Ben receives a pull request for a tiny grammatical change in the English of a comment deep inside libuv.
• He rejects the patch because he judges the overhead of adding a new contributor, filing the signed CLA, etc. isn't worth such a tiny, seemingly insignificant change.
• Ben has nothing against women and in fact volunteers lots of real personal time encouraging women to get into technical fields.
• The honest and helpful contribution was rejected because a honest and helpful maintainer didn't understand the value of it.

Then:

• Isaac pushed the commit through because he feels strongly that we should support women in tech wherever possible. Joyent does own the copyright on libuv and thus has final say on commit policy even though most the code was written by non-Joyent employees.
• Shortly after the push, he received sign-off from another maintainer.
• Ben was upset and probably annoyed. Not at the presence of better English in the comment, but the manner in which is was forced through fueled by political ideals.
• He publicly chided Isaac for the manner in which the commit was made and reverted the commit.
• Bert upon seeing that this might cause trouble, quickly (about 30 minutes later) undid Ben's revert and advised him to leave it alone for a while.

Ok, we're adults, this kind of thing happens. Different people have different opinions on how to solve social problems. We all want the same end goals, we just sometimes differ on how is the best way to proceed.

But then the crap hit the fan!

I won't recount all the negativity that resulted from this minor disagreement, but suffice to say, most of it was entirely uncalled for.

I'm glad Joyent has a unified engineering team dedicated to helping increase diversity and inclusiveness for women in tech. It's very convenient that they even all agree on the techniques to achieve this.

I'm glad Ben helps where he feels he is valuable. I have a similar tactic where I focus my energy with js-git and other projects. This helps me feel empathy for Ben.

However, I plead and urge us to stop fueling this angry mob.

I fear that Mikeal's post about "Inclusive by Exclusion" will come across as hypocritical to some and encourage others to continue being aggressive and mean. I'm not sure exactly how it helps us behave better.

I have watched the polarizing effect of the Joyent blog post where Bryan implies that Ben is being an a-hole and would have been fired on the spot had he been a Joyent employee. How does this help things? All it appears to do it further divide the community and prevent rational conversation.

It doesn't help our community to segregate us into competing groups like Joyent vs StrongLoop and Ruby vs JavaScript and male vs female.

We can do better than this. I for one celebrate diversity in all its forms. I'm a Mormon, many of my programming friends are vocal atheists. I'm a man, but I learned programming from my mom and older sister.

I don't choose sides in politics because I feel that pitting my opinion in opposition to some else who has an alternative and creative way to solve the same common goal is stupid.

I know I always take a lot of heat when I speak out on these things, but we need to stop being so aggressive. Most women will avoid a situation if there are angry men arguing back and forth. It doesn't matter if the men feel they are helping women by supporting "diversity".

I feel that aggressiveness will do far more harm to women than the gender of a couple words in a comment deep inside a library will ever do.

I feel that attacking a developer because he made an honest mistake and didn't understand the gravity of his comment will only drive him away and make men even more likely to be afraid when around women. It will make it harder for men and women to work together. Nobody should be afraid of anyone. Two wrongs don't make a right.

If you really want the world to get better, then join me in celebrating diversity in all its forms. Be accepting of other humans who have different opinions than you. You don't have to agree with their beliefs to be their friend and find creative ways to solve problems together.

We can do better.

Now if you don't mind, I'd like to go back to creating software to help more kids get into programming.

-Tim Caswell

This is my response.

In the 24 hours, or so, since this event happened, Twitter has been ablaze with analysis and commentary -- and during that time, throughout the world, approximately 20,000 people of starvation. It's clear -- we are all blinded by privilege and unwilling to see ourselves in the problem. Where is the Love?

While I have no cause to think Ben is sexist, I do believe his actions contributed towards the backlash. He was likely responding to the comment that gender-specific language is hostile (a hugely inflammatory, unfair accusation) and, as a result, and possibly due to the fact that this shit happens all the time, he made some poor decisions, including his public chiding of the project lead and revert of the commit.

Thus far, I've not seen Ben completely own up to his mistakes. He reacted defensively. He needs to own it. Then, put it behind him. It's not that big of a deal.

I would challenge any who are concerned about the existence of gender-specific language in our open source documentation to join the 24-pull requests effort and use the next 24 days to make a real and positive difference with what you find to be important. It's through contributing that one learns how challenging it is to share software and how harsh the community can sometimes be with freely shared work.

We are supposed to be a community of developers who believe in openness and cooperation. That should be a group norm. The biggest problem I see here is that too many people are quick to point fingers and eager to join lynch mobs, but not enough of us are willing to do the work. In the end, it's about code on servers. Even gender-specific language is better than nothing at all. But, if you want more, you need to do the work. Stop the blogs and tweets for awhile and start working.

This is shocking to see that sort of blog post in Joyent's corporate blog. Is this really the official position of Joyent on this incident?
To me saying what they said about one of the top volunteer committers after all he has done to the project is absolute nonsense. This is very bad PR IMO.
Looks like Joyent is just a bunch of kids.

+1

There's a lot to agree with in your comments. But the quote below is an empirical claim that I'm skeptical of:

Most women will avoid a situation if there are angry men arguing back and forth. It doesn't matter if the men feel they are helping women by supporting "diversity".

The main reason I'm skeptical is probably that you're a guy talking about what most women want in a very declarative way. But another reason is that, of the women who code that I follow on twitter, none seemed to be negative about the "angry men arguing back and forth", and most were explicitly thankful to both Isaac and Joyent. A few examples:

https://twitter.com/SaraJChipps/status/406902849579524096
https://twitter.com/jllord/status/406920539018502144
https://twitter.com/aredridel/status/406915335385014272
https://twitter.com/bodil/status/407117603745050625
https://twitter.com/ceejbot/status/407010296666943488

So I guess I'd have to ask: do you feel like you have access to different data than me, and did the women you know in the community feel very differently? And if not, what about the situation would encourage you to overrule the women we're hearing from, who seem to be saying that they're glad this was taken seriously and they want to be part of a community that will stand up for them in this way?

Thanks.

Well said Tim. A voice of reason in the midst of the lynch mob.

@creationix

Nice post ! The following statement confused me

Joyent does own the copyright on libuv and thus has final say on commit policy even though most the code was written by non-Joyent employees.

as the license for libuv says

Copyright Joyent, Inc. and other Node contributors.

Unless I am miss understanding it.

+1

@cjb, at least one woman in that topic said something different, but then other woman said "Your wife, unfortunately, is wrong." (someone's wife - not mine).

Before I posted (joyent/libuv#1015 (comment) and following) I actually discussed this topic with my girlfriend (master in sociology and soon to be master in law, dabbles with gender studies from time to time too) and she actually said that she's not surprised and that I shouldn't think low about these people or gender studies, because they are smart and want good it's just that they were caught by the trap of negative mob mentality.

But do we really need to be validated by women to see that it has gone too far and that harm was done?

BTW, after all this the guy who strikes me as the only one who didn't learn anything is Bryan Cantrill. This guy looks to me as if he could kill off half his team if it brought him few clients.

@cjb, ouch, there goes another one! joyent/libuv#1015 (comment)

Have a lot to say, but won't do it. Just one question, has @bnoordhuis really backed off? That'd be just sad.

I hope everyone gets to read this.

@cjb, at least one woman in that topic said something different, but then other woman said "Your wife, unfortunately, is wrong [about the change not being valuable]." (someone's wife - not mine).

The woman who said that the change was not valuable is not a programmer, and the woman who disagreed and said that even small changes help is a programmer. I'm trying to listen to women who program at the moment -- they're the people directly affected by the decision.

But do we really need to be validated by women to see that it has gone too far and that harm was done?

I was pointing out that the claim "Most women [just want us to stop arguing]" is testable and directly contradicted by the behavior of most women in the thread.

To answer your question, though: yes, of course our decisions about how to be inclusive towards women should be "validated" by them. When deciding how to treat women (or any other group), we should start with something like this:

1. Ask women who would be affected by our actions how they want to be treated.
2. Listen. Was there a strong consensus?
3. Do that.

Right now, @kamiltrebunia and @creationix seem to have jumped straight to 3). That seems somewhere between arrogant and disrespectful, especially since the consensus from where I'm sitting was so strongly in favor of not tolerating Ben's behavior.

@cbj

Believe it or not, I am women and programmer. I created a new Github account for this, because frankly I do not need the same lynch mob that vent after bnoordhuis going after me. I do not have enough twitter followers to go into such PR fight with people who are way better in writing outrage then I am.

Until I read this discussion, I had not idea that "he" in docs is hostile. I do not care about he/she/it in the documentation and I believe most woman dont. Women I know personally do not care about such things, so I doubt that there is consensus you talk about.

• another another woman not seeing it hostile: joyent/libuv#1015 (comment)
• yet another woman not seeing it hostile: joyent/libuv#1015 (comment)

Feel free to convince Github to start a poll for all woman accounts on who considers such thing hostile.

It is just that those woman that do care are loudest and frankly, have tendency to bully the rest of the world. I do not even count as a real woman in their view, cause I do not share their opinions. Look at how the discussion is framed: "you support hostile environment", "everyone who do not consider it big deal does not belong to our team".

This blog post starts about slightly different issue then the one at hand, but read it anyway: http://www.snipe.net/2013/04/free-github-repos-for-women/

I did not wrote it, but it pretty much sums up my thoughts on the whole men vs woman in tech issue. Read also comments to it. Minor things are blown out of proportion, because, well, real problems are hard to solve, so we will beat random males over what is non-issue in any other context.

Last note: convincing people that disagreeing on this topic could make them unemployable or is fireable offence (re read original thread) is a way how to win argument. Sure. It is also what I call hostile, threatening, bullying and a reason why I cowardly will not say my name.

I agree with @IWouldRatherNotSayWhoIAm that a male gender pronoun in documentation to describe a generic user is FAR from hostile. The original PR author who suggested such set up a situation that was explosive and damaging.

What was hostile was how Ben handled it. Gender neutral writing is more accurate, and therefore an improvement to the body of work, just like any other PR and coding improvement. The PR should have been handled like any other PR for any minor coding improvement.

That's not what happened. It was clear the PR author was making a political statement when he made the comment that the language, as it stood, was hostile. At that point, the issue should have been treated more carefully.

You might wonder why Ben is held to account more than the dozens of others who were at least equally as hostile? It is because Ben was the gatekeeper. That authority comes with responsibility.

IMO, Ben made bad choices in a very difficult situation, a situation not of his making. Making bad choices doesn't make someone bad. Just means Ben is human.

I also agree with @IWouldRatherNotSayWhoIAm that the climate has become very combative. But, that goes both ways. At 52 years of age, the truth is I feel like I have stepped back 20 years in terms of women's issues. It is difficult to be taken seriously in the male-dominated open source community.

As an aside, I really hate it when these things happen and I read posts from a group of men linking to quotes from women in an attempt to demystify what those of my gender think or believe or want to have happen. We are no different than you, we think, believe, and behave differently. We are people.

The fact is it is correct to write in gender neutral ways about users. Users are neither exclusively male or female. There is no good reason to reject contributions that seek to improve code or documentation. It is time to cooperate and cut the bullshit.

People on both sides can whine all they want up about those people or we can all grow up. This issue was a sign of a lack of cooperation in a community that prides itself on that hallmark. Shameful reflection of who we really are. Everyone rallying to one side or the other, no one willing to accept mistakes were made, to learn from them, and to move forward together. So stupid. It means yet another lesson awaits us.

Lastly, @IWouldRatherNotSayWhoIAm, thank you for sharing and I am so very sorry that you do not feel comfortable doing so as yourself. I appreciate your comments.

I am a woman developer and I'm not going to leave the room because OMG Men Are Angry! I am GLAD there are men angrily advocating for feminism, because the folks who need to hear this shit won't listen to women.

+1

@adrienne I hardly see this grammar issue as furthering the cause for women. Frankly, it sets us back in terms of raising real issues. Anything said is just another drama. There are far bigger gains we should be focusing on and much more constructive ways to do so.

@cjb, my data is countless personal conversations with women both inside and outside of tech. I've made it a point to ask about this topic whenever I get an opportunity for the last several years. I am not a women and therefore can only observe their behavior and believe what they tell me.

You present as "proof" the fact that most the women bold enough to comment in the heated argument are ones that are OK with heated arguments. Do you not see that is a self-selecting group heavily biased towards people who already agree with you?

Please think outside the bubbles we form thanks to modern social networks of self-selected friends. It's hard for all of us, but we should make a better effort to remember that there is so much more to the world than what we've formed for ourselves.

@AmyStephen, did you read any of the several studies about how gendered language does in fact contribute to stereotype threat and decreases women's feelings of investment and participation? Those articles have been linked in several places now.

Language matters.

@creationix, you were asked by a member of my team to correct your assertion that we "all have the same political leanings." You said you would make the correction; would you mind following through on that please? To me and to us, this is not a political issue but one of basic decency and effective engineering. And (as a point of fact) we (emphatically) do not have the same political leanings (and nor do we live in the same geographical area, for whatever it's worth). It is most accurate to say: "I'm glad Joyent has a unified engineering team that believes that empathy is a core engineering value, and that Ben's actions constituted an unacceptable breach of those values."

@bacntrill, I did make the change. I added the phrase "...on this topic" to the end and linked to your tweet where you said this. Is this not what what you and he meant? https://twitter.com/notmatt/status/407289964318040065

So I'm confused, is your engineering team unified on this topic or not?

@creationix, We are absolutely unified on this issue, but we don't have the "same political leanings" because this isn't a political issue! And yes, this cuts to the very fundamental difference that you and I seem to have about this: you think that this is political, where to me it is about decency. I'm not seeking to resolve that difference -- I'm seeking for you to change what you're saying about my team to represent the points of fact. We do not have the same political leanings (trust me); we do, however, have unity on this issue.

@bacntrill, yes I think you're absolutely right that is the core of where we disagree. But now that it's clear I'll adjust the language. Sorry for the misrepresentation.

@creationix, Thank you.

@adrienne Did you read my response? What isn't helpful is all of the hostilities on both sides.

@bcantrill After thinking about it for a while, I realized that perhaps I am unclear and appearing to be more antagonistic than I really am.

You say "this" is about decency and I say "that" is about politics. That's great, but what exactly are "this" and "that" and are they the same thing? After trying harder to understand your point-of-view I realized we agree a lot more than I thought.

What you and I both call decency is trying to have empathy for others and look out for them. It's being aware that every action we make as leaders can have good and bad effects on others. I think I can safely say that you agree with these things.

What I'm calling politics is the particular actions that we as people design to accomplish these noble goals. In classic politics there was a divide between people who thought that having a strong central government would lead to a stronger nation and an improved life for all people. Others felt that strong states and a weak central government was the way to accomplish the same thing. As I was taught in school, these two ideas formed political parties who used democracy and debate to convince others that their way was the best way.

What I was trying to say in my article is that we all have different ideas of how to have empathy and how to make our field more welcoming to all. We share this common goal, but in this issue, there seems to be some people who are of the opinion that messing with using gender-neutral pronouns is an ineffective use of time . Others believe that it's actually very important.

I'm not taking sides in this, I'm just pointing out that in our zeal to debate this we've ignored the elephant in the room. Yes Ben showed a lack of empathy for people who feel the pronoun was an important issue. He showed a lack of empathy for the women who this does actually affect. But the much greater lack of empathy was all the people who attacked him for his minor mistake. They showed zero empathy towards him and made a small issue into a huge issue. It's almost as if there is a double standard with regards to what is acceptable behavior.

When I said that the Joyent team was united in their political view on this, what I meant is that you all agreed that the pronoun issue was indeed an important issue and that Ben should have known that.

I'm sorry if my use of the word "political" caused any misunderstanding. I hope this helps clear things up.

When I said that the Joyent team was united in their political view on this, what I meant is that you all agreed that the pronoun issue was indeed an important issue and that Ben should have known that.

I will explain what I think, which is subtly, but I think importantly, different.

No, he need not have known a priori that the pronoun issue is important. He needed to recognize people's reaction to his actions indicated that it was important to them.

After Isaac's push, there were any number of things he could have done that most would have been better, including giving Isaac the benefit of the doubt that short-circuiting the sign-off was in fact appropriate, responding to the very calm and reasonable questions from the PR author, explaining his reasoning, or simply shrugging and moving on.

Even if the calm and articulate explanations of the importance of the issue were lost in the noise, surely a reasonable person would view the sheer amount of noise as a giant waving flag saying "This Is A Bigger Deal Than You Thought At First."

He chose instead to brush aside all those concerns and all those options, and revert the commit. This is the decision which we all agree was egregiously, brutally wrong.

It's almost as if there is a double standard with regards to what is acceptable behavior.

I disagree. In reality there is no shortage of attacks to go around. We could compare almost endlessly, but if you think that opposing Ben's actions is all pats on the back, I would encourage you to look at the kind of things being directed in this general direction:

@moonpolysoft because smart pricks are who gets shit done, while PC faggots like @bcantrill are completely unneccessary - https://twitter.com/jokeocracy/status/407200412840632320

So let's take the attacks as a wash for the moment, believe at least for the sake of argument that there are incoherent and aggressive people on both sides, and discuss the benefit of the doubt that Ben did receive, which does not actually come without cost.

My personal experience on Saturday morning was pretty lousy. I got back-channel messages during breakfast along the lines of "wtf is Joyent thinking?". Communities I'm involved in were deriding the team, and the public uproar was dismaying. I encourage you to check the timestamps of events - this was not a particularly short time. It's frustrating and humiliating for people you know and respect to pass judgement on you for actions you never would have taken, fundamentally disagree with, and which actually have nothing to do with you!

I bit my tongue through this in the belief that anyone acting in good faith and observing the consequences of their actions would weigh in to explain themselves. When @bcantrill finally posted, there was still no indication that this was coming; Ben hadn't made a public comment on the issue or reversion at all.

So I can't see this as a double standard. It's a deeply horrible and lousy situation, agreed, but it is one that Ben made entirely for himself, and he had several chances to engage in sober second thought and address himself. There must be a point at which the consequences of Ben's actions actually come to rest on Ben's shoulders, even as deeply unpleasant as those are bound to be.

And for the record, being called a "PC faggot" (I can only assume it applies by association) is something I will wear as a badge of pride compared to someone I volunteer with saying "sigh, Joyent looks like a bunch of bros."

@creationix Thanks, I see the selection bias there. I wanted to hear that you've got a good reason for discounting those voices, and it sounds like it's something you've considered carefully.

+!!!

whateva, you're a mangina