"...and if he had been, he wouldn't be as of this morning: 
    to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun 
    on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered 
    would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent. 
    On the one hand, it seems ridiculous (absurd, perhaps) to 
    fire someone over a pronoun -- but to characterize it that 
    way would be a gross oversimplification: it's not the use of 
    the gendered pronoun that's at issue (that's just sloppy), 
    but rather the insistence that pronouns should in fact be 
    gendered. To me, that insistence can only come from one 
    place: that gender—specifically, masculinity—is inextricably 
    linked to software, and that's not an attitude that Joyent 
    tolerates."

Seriously? You're attributing this insistence to malice without considering another viewpoint: This could be simple grammar nazism from someone who takes a prescriptionist (as opposed to a descriptionist) viewpoint on English grammar. For a very long time, gendered pronouns have been considered the grammatically correct form. Acceptance of gender neutral form is relatively new, maybe one to three decades old in common use. There are other possibilities than this being a case of active overt sexism. At the end of the day, you need to remember that we are in an industry where we all rubberneck at a huge debate over the proper use of the semicolon in Javascript to cite one example.

Gendered pronouns becoming an issue of sexism entered the discussion the same way that the concepts of double negatives entered the English language. Someone simple decided to make a stink about it until everyone believed it. I don't know who was responsible for making gendered pronouns a sexism issue in English, but in the case of double negatives, you can attribute that popular language change to Bishop Robert Lowth, when he published A Short Introduction to English Grammar with Critical Notes in 1762.

At the end of the day most romance languages are inextricably linked to a linguistic concept of gender, but you don't see any speakers of those languages making a big issue about the political correctness of their mother tongue. Why? Because linguistic gender and sexual gender are extremely weakly related and they are only strongly related in English because a strong relationship has been argued for by people with nothing better to do until it is a popular concept.