I'd like to know this as well. I know many female karate practitioners and not a single one ever proposed changing the traditional Japanese nomenclature because she didn't feel "welcome" or felt "excluded" or even "offended" by it.
Here's the official explanation of what the word means:
Kata (型 or 形 literally: "form") is a Japanese word describing detailed choreographed patterns of movements practised either solo or in pairs.
The site is called CodeWars, not CodeDances or CodeCaligraphy. Kata here is clearly associated with martial arts. Martial arts and war tend to be popular with men and less popular with women. Is that really a contentious point? Do you want a market survey to back that up? Or have you actually been to a karate class and opened your eyes? I trained kung fu for six years and have gone to taster sessions and occasional classes in karate, savate, jui jitsu, escrima, tai chi and aikido. Martial arts is more popular with men than with women. Everyone knows this except you, apparently.
Also, you put "welcome", "excluded" and "offended" in quotation marks. Sandrae did not say any of those words. Whoever you were quoting isn't really relevant to this discussion.
I think it's because we associate kata specifically with _martial_ arts in Western usage. The meaning takes on a militant tone when that context is the starting point.
I speak Japanese and 形 is just a normal word to me. I don't see it as militant at all. In fact, I find it offensive that someone is so culturally self-centered and solipsistic as to demand changes to language using a perfectly neutral word simply because they can't see past cultural/language differences. I guarantee you that if you brought up this issue with a Japanese person (from Japan), they'd have no idea what you're talking about - literally.
Stop demanding the whole world adjusts to you and your solipsistic ways and try to be more tolerant of cultural differences and diversity. If I was the creator of the website, I'd probably have told the OP to fuck off because I don't want shit-stirrers and culturally insensitive people on my website.
Well, but you are now saying, "ignore the past 60-odd years of appropriation of the culture, and buy into this new appropriation! It's all different! We're marketing authenticity now!"
This site's theme uses the gravity of the old "Oriental mystique" trope to seem a little more impressive - to make programming practice sound "exotic" or "badass". What the fuck does a ukiyo-e image have to do with programming? No Japanese site would choose this theme, in the same way that you have observed that no Japanese person would think of 形 as a militant word. The Western equivalent would be to plaster a Dutch Golden Age painting onto the background and substitute Dutch words like "drillen" and "uitoefening" for "kata". It would be ridiculous and nobody would take it seriously.
The problem is, we already have fine English words for what is being done: "exercise" and "practice". "kata" remains associated with McDojos that want to impress you - it's not a borrowed word that has entered everyday use. And we've grown into accepting that it exists in that context over time. But its usage can still be considered not just offensive but colonial, in any Western context. It's an outright theft of culture.
