In the last couple of days a row has broken out over on Github regarding an innocuous and well-meant pull request(to replace a gender-specific pronoun ("he") with a gender-neutral version ("they")) which blew up into an almighty "is this really important" fight, which then spilt over onto Twitter and Hacker News, fanned by a blog post from Joyent, which pulled no punches.

This follows on from the PyCon incident earlier this year where a couple of (male) attendees were publicly 'outed' for using inappropriate (schoolboy humour) language. This turned into an even bigger row as the woman who outed them was then herself fired for her behaviour (not entirely sure what for - possibly being aggressive?)

Gender (in)equality is a big issue, and it is important, but to me the most enlightening thing that has come out of 2013 is that the tech community is actually having an open and frank discussion about these issues,and I think everyone in the community should be proud of that. It's an issue that's being tackled head on, and in the public arena. Which is a very good thing.

[Update - following on from the Joyent debate, both Rails and Django have updated their documentation guidelines to enforce gender neutrality.]