Comment Emotionally charged sexism term (Score 1) 1255
"For instance, I am currently part of an email conversation with a prominent FOSS community member who has been pilloried who is hurt and baffled that I (or anyone else) could apply the word "sexism" to them. Their reasoning? They did not intend to be sexist, so therefore they can't possibly be. Therefore, labelling their behavior as unacceptable is unfair, they argue. The fact that, in context, their actions and remarks could not possibly be described in any other way honestly does not seem to have occurred to them. No matter what I say, they remain hurt and baffled -- and, like so many, deeply in denial."
The version of sexism as I see it(and I'm guessing most people in the UK/western world) is sexism *is* an intentional chauvinistic attitude, http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=sexism and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexism are the main things I am looking at right now. I can see that sexism may technically mean "the belief or attitude that one gender or sex is inferior to, less competent, or less valuable than the other", but this would mean that their intentions would be very important into determining what is meant. Using an emotionally charged word like that to describe someone without defining it would hurt most people, there is no reason to be surprised here.
I believe there might well be some bias in the FOSS world against women (although I've never encountered it due to working on fair few projects) and this should be rallied against (it's just foolish to be biased and helps noone, the project would suffer from fewer contributors), but labelling it sexism places it close to "women should be in the kitchen" thinking in my mind and is unproductive and will lead to defensiveness and even resentment from the male community for being labelled as such. It seems as if the author can't understand why someone might be hurt by being labelled a sexist.
In all, this doesn't seem to be very objective or useful reporting and is purely to get clicks and links onto his site and stir up some debate. In my opinion.