Sexism, tech conferences & Twitter hatred

Few days ago, a bad situation happened at PyCon. Reportedly, some developers were making some forking jokes and Adria Richards, a (ex) Sendgrid-employed developer evangelist was offended by these jokes. She talked about feminism and stuff like that.

First of all, I don’t understand how that sexual joke is specifically addressed in women. Last time I checked, sexual intercourse didn’t require exclusively women to be a thing. So, I guess this may be as insulting for a guy as it is for a girl. In my point of view, that’s the whole point of feminism. We’re equal. Otherwise, it’s just favouritism.

Ok, I get it. Tech industry is dominated by males. But that doesn’t mean that we are more sexist than males in other industries. Personally, I have no problem accepting that a woman can kick my ass in any of my skills. And I know for sure that many women actually exactly that.

But the main point I want to make is that it’s just a mother-flipping joke. There’s something more important than the urge to politically correct every single conference, TV show, work environment etc. It’s called humour and knowing when to chillax and just enjoy yourself.

And as a matter of facts, the “fork you” joke is pretty common. Github made a bold move and implemented it in the user interface, when you’re forking a repo.

Why do we tend to overcomplicate things?