I'm all for less sexism in the tech community, but this just looks like someone taking an opportunity to make a furor, rather than constructively working to change attitudes.
One of the easiest and most powerful actions you can take to change attitudes towards acceptable behaviour in a community is, unsurprisingly, to immediately express disapproval whenever undesirable behaviour happens in your presence.
It's Frown Power. It's effective. Sqoot engaged in some pretty douche-y sexism in the e-presence of thousands of people, and thousands of people are expressing disapproval back at them. It's a safe bet they'll get the message that doing things like that in the future is undesirable, because having people vociferously disapprove of you isn't a pleasant experience.
It might not fix the attitudes of the people who wrote that line, but if it discourages the expression of those attitudes, the culture will radically change in a quite short period of time regardless of whether or not those individuals ever get a clue.
(Incidentally, comparing Sqoot getting told off on twitter and losing some sponsors to minorities being murdered because of their race is more than needlessly hyperbolic).
As one of those elusive "females in tech" who generally gets somewhat tired of hearing about all of the complaints about sexism in tech, because I think a lot of people are overly sensitive to it, Sqoot's actions were the first thing I've read in a long time that actually offended me.
You're sarcastic but I think we should be far more ravenous to go after them. Why defend, what purpose does it serve? Sure there is this anti-political-correct strain that is popular but this is just not acceptable.
Honestly, for me, it's not even about women. For me, I don't want my industry to be known as this "brogrammer" nonsense or just so completely sexist that it just shocks normal sensibilities. Even if there were no women in computing and there never would be, I don't think we want to be seen as being so openly ridiculous on this kind of stuff. We're supposed so forward thinking technologically but in the cultural sense we are stuck in the Mad Men days. It's sad.
I don't think anyone in particular tried to make a furor, more that this was just a particularly egregious and dumb case, where it was easy for everyone to pile on and apparent to everyone what the proper resolution was. It snowballed quickly because unlike more pervasive gender issues in the tech community, this was an easy one to solve, if not avoid in the first place.
"Let's have a lynching."