Ye, calling this sexism, is either an editorial edit by TC, for reasons I can only assume is high clickbait title, or JAH has some issues herself, which it seems like considering that she thought watching girls hulahoop is sexist.
The article, strangely, begins with JAH already having an unspecified grievance against GitHub and the founder's wife pleading with her not to leave GitHub and blog publicly about it. It's strange that at no time has JAH specified what this grievance was, but my educated guess based on her tweets and her blog post from a year ago would be, previous additional incidents of sexism or perceived sexism.
I suspect the nature of the founder's wife is that the founder and his partner decided that a female was the best person to handle the omitted original issue.
Since the wife may have been there when it was just three guys, the non-employee boundary might not be there as with other staff partners. She probably thought she was helping.
