> There had been interest, but one of the committers had dismissed the idea out of hand because a woman had proposed it.
This also blows my mind. 100% of my colleagues and friends who work in programming would suffer severe whiplash from the double take they would take after reading a statement like that from someone we were working with. How would someone who says something like that in a non-joking way not be immediately ostracized? They would be in any programmer community I've ever been a part of (besides maybe /g/? though even there I think people would just roll their eyes and assume you were trolling.)
I really hope that this doesn't becomes something that's NEVER OK to joke about.
When in a situation where someone might say something terrible, I'll sometimes go ahead and say it jokingly. The way I see it, getting everyone to laugh at how ridiculous it sounds is way to reinforce that it was unacceptable. And sometimes I think it was there anyway - somebody was thinking it but not saying it or it was implicit in their thinking and they didn't even notice.
For instance, when discussing which interns should be assigned which tasks, John was initially paired with the IT department. Then we realized that John was unavailable that day, so it defaulted to Julie. And I feigned puzzlement for a moment and said "Are you sure we should't wait for John? Girls don't like computers." Which was my way of needling my co-worker about the fact that initially defaulting to the male intern might not have been entirely arbitrary. I knew him well enough that he'd take my point without feeling like I was accusing him.
TL;DR, I think there's a difference between a sexist joke and joking about sexism
I get what you're saying, but there seems to be a bit a subjective decision being made there. Would you make a similar joke with a racial (instead of gender-based) slant in that situation? I doubt it. Or would you work the Holocaust (sorry, used for shock effect) into the joke? This is just to say that there are obviously some things you would never joke about. So who decides what's acceptable and what's not? The person making the joke?
I've heard some good snarky comments about the way police interact with black people that brought race and humor into dangerous proximity. I wouldn't say that there are topics I would never joke about, but there are implications I would never make. I'd joke about NASCAR being a boy's club but not about women drivers. The old "Punching Up / Punching Down" distinction.
And nobody gets to "decide" what everyone else should feel. What I have a problem with is the idea that it's not the meaning of your utterance that makes it offensive, but merely the topic. The idea that tome expressed in the parent comment that there was literally no circumstance under which you could joke about women being treated unfairly (even if it was to call attention to the problem).
I find the idea of someone declaring what's "not okay" for everyone else to be as upsetting as a boor telling a mean-spirited joke and insisting that nobody should be offended because it's just a joke.
Maybe in the style of the old tv show "All in the Family" where an openly racist character often said racist things in a way that highlighted the foolishness of racism? Just guessing.
Different people and groups have different tolerances for off-color humor. One person's humor is another person's outrage. Note that my response is not an endorsement of those sort of jokes.
This also blows my mind. 100% of my colleagues and friends who work in programming would suffer severe whiplash from the double take they would take after reading a statement like that from someone we were working with. How would someone who says something like that in a non-joking way not be immediately ostracized? They would be in any programmer community I've ever been a part of (besides maybe /g/? though even there I think people would just roll their eyes and assume you were trolling.)