TL;DR; Peer pressure (including making him inflate the importance of the issue in the developer community in the first place).<p>Really, most hacker types could not give a rats ass about if someone is of different race or sex, as long as he has what it takes coding wise. Heck, even the first programmer was a woman (and a mighty fine, if unapreciated, modern programming language).<p>All this sexism/racism talks is from the influx of non hacker types, when programming became fashionable. Those hipsters brought their "arts degree" concerns and faux sensibilities along for the ride.<p>They just like to blab about how tolerant they are, because it's fashionable. Nothing inherently progressive about their feelings. Worse, in my experience, as much as they like to pay lip service to non sexism and such, they fare far worse at sexism than geeks of old.<p>Do those people even know and appreciate the work of people such as Lynne Jolitz, for example?