Perhaps not whitespace, but I think people insisting on using blacklist or master-slave terminology in computing will actually see direct consequences. Plenty of big tech companies have made their engineers scrub such words from their internal codebase, even going so far as to rename the master branch of Git to main.
I am pretty sure that an employee insisting not to abide by this mandate would be reprimanded and even fired if they don't stop.
I am aware it is still being used in many places. Nevertheless, the term has been discouraged by exactly this type of initiative, more successfully in some places rather than others.
A couple of guys were escorted out of a conference and then fired, for making jokes about 'forking' repo's and big 'dongles' [0]. It's a perfect example of the loud minority ruining lives over what most people I know (including women) will consider a harmless joke.
