Katherine Sierra writes: In the ’80s, skate culture devolved from a vibrant, reasonably gender-balanced community into an aggressively narrow demographic of teen boys. If you think tech has sexism issues, skate culture makes tech feel like one big Oprah show.

My surfer friends and I would occasionally gather on a summer evening, loosen the trucks on our boards, and carve the lazy hills of the Altadena suburbs. But the space between sessions grew longer, and eventually I was the last remaining woman in our group.

Then I found a new love: programming.

I felt that same beautiful freedom writing code that I knew and loved from skating. Compared with what skate culture had become, everything about tech felt fresh and possible. Where skateboarding now celebrated destruction, computer culture celebrated creation.

Fast forward 30 years. Rodney Mullen believes skate culture has something positive to offer the tech world, and the tech world is paying attention. Rodney can help tech—and I hope tech listens—but only if we decouple Rodney from the toxic, sexist, soul-crushing culture of modern skating. Soul-crushing, that is, for women.

Rodney has the same big heart and cognitive biases of so many men in tech—kind, brilliant, wonderful men that cannot grasp how the community they find so accepting and open can be so … not. Rodney believes open-source and hacking culture has so much in common with skateboarding, a culture in which nobody “owns” a trick and everyone learns from and builds upon what others have done. And Rodney’s right: skating does have the bold, innovative, rule-challenging fear of the status quo that Silicon Valley seems to have lost.

But a fresh POV can never be worth lionizing a deeply sexist culture.