Today, an user who I'll remain anonymous, created an issue tittle Naming, gender stereotypes etc where he brought up a few questions about the project lib rename from model_mommy to model_bakery.
After my comment, the person asked me to deleted the issue because he thought he had expressed his thoughts in a bad manner which could lead people to think he was against the fighting inequality. Since I don't want this project to become a place where people start to get judged by what they've once said in a hidden Github issue, I'm documenting my replies to his questions because I think they can be helpful if someone brings up the same discussion in the future.
Original content
From @berinhard:
Hi ANON_USER, thanks for your comment. I'd like to reply to your questions making sure that my answers reflect only my personal opinions and they don't say anything about the other maintainers points of view.
How does the renaming of the project help to fight gender stereotypes in tech?
I think that just the existence of this issue is an example of how it can help. This whole discussion won't even exist on this public space if we didn't rename the project and openly address it with the goal of to not reinforce gender stereotypes.
But, even so, I'm maybe not the best person to answer your question properly. Because, first of all, I identify myself as a man, so I don't suffer from any kind of prejudice based on my gender and, second, there are a lot of people who really study and debate this question deeper than I'll ever be able to. In the Python community, for example, Naomi Ceder is doing an incredible work on this direction. I highly recommend you to watch, at least, her talk Antipatterns for Diversity where she touches this gender stereotypes discussion. If you have time and interest, I also recommend you to watch Farewell and Welcome Home: Python in Two Genders at PyCon 2014 where she talks from a more personal point of view about this and other topics.
But I can share with you my personal experience on this process. What I've seen and heard were a a lot of complaints from many people who I admire about the name of the lib. I've even had a very productive discussion about it when I submitted a talk to DjangoCon in 2015, if I'm not wrong about the year. There were also people coming to me and openly saying that they won't use the lib because of clients who were offended by the name and don't want it on their projects. So, even though I couldn't properly understand all the reasons behind it at the time, the reality was a single one: the project name sounds bad one for other people.
I'm a very practical person and when I face the fact that things that I do can potentially harm other people, I just try to change my behavior to prevent this. Simple as that. I wasn't able to maintain the project anymore knowing this and I only had two possible outcomes: drop the project or propose other ways to evolve it. That's when @amureki and @anapaulagomes offered the help to maintain the project and that's when we started to work together on the rename and moved the repo from my personal Github account to this organization.
Are you sure the old project name was based on gender stereotypes in tech rather than biological roles?
I'd be speculating if I answer you that and I'd prefer not to do so. I'm not the project creator and I can't talk about the old name decision. The person who created, a good friend of mine, is no longer maintaining the project and gave me free pass to any kind of project design decision at the time he left, including the project rename.
Anyway, as I strongly refuses the idea of reducing people's genders to biological roles, as many researchers also do, I can only think that the old project name reinforces gender stereotypes.
How come there's other maintained projects of the contributors that look even more stereotypical (grandma)? Are there any plans to rename them as well?
This question does not apply to model bakery or the rename discussion.
Do you think it would be a good idea to contact the creators of FactoryGirl and ObjectDaddy and ask them to rename their projects, too?
I really like this idea, although I won't be the person to do so because maintaining model bakery and my other personal projects already consumes a lot the free time that I devote to free software contributions. If anyone else wants to do so and thinks that model bakery's rename is a good example to use, feel free to do so =)
Now, ANON_USER since you've done a research on the contributors personal projects and profiles, I couldn't avoid doing the same with you. I noticed that this very elaborated issue is practically your only open activity in Github for the last 2 years, so I'm assuming this discussion is very important to you and I'm glad you've started it.
But, if you allow me to, I'd also like to invite you to have a more frequent open source activity on Github by not only creating issues, but also collaborating with the code itself. People spend a good amount of their personal time creating and maintaining projects so other people, like you and me, don't have to do so. Although this "business model" is not the ideal one, is the only one we have developed so far as open source development and I'd like to welcome you to help growing free software as well.
I don't know how much time did you take to open this issue or to study our personal profiles, but I'd like to invite you to do the same with our open issues and maybe help us to improve the project. For example, I really liked your critique about the Kid
model in our docs. This is something that I didn't notice and can be improved. Feel free to open an issue and help us with that!
If you're not interested on helping with model bakery, please do so with other projects. Code contributions from new people are crucial for a better and more diverse free software development environment.
I'm closing this issue since it won't result in any kind of change in the project's code base.