Female and Male Googlers append “Lady” to their titles
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Imagine if someone said "I have a question for the black Chief Legal Officer" or "I have a question for the overweight professor" (ok, the latter hits too close to home -- darn free food at google). A superfluous specifier emphasizes the thing that's being specified.
'Ms.' would have been a valid choice, which the person correcting him used to little controversy. I think the problem was not using a gender specific pronoun and rather the way it was used. For example, directing somebody to a stranger and refering to them as 'the lady over there', is totally different than saying 'the lady CFO' as if it qualifies her title. Addressing her as 'Ms. CFO' would be appropriate, as is 'Mr./M(r)s. President' for example.
"The CFO" is using her title, as would be used as the object of a sentence ("I have a question for the CFO").
You wouldn't say "I have a question for Mr. President" - you'd say "I have a question for the President."
"Lady CFO" would be an archaic, first-person form of address. "Lady CFO, prithee explain to me what Alphabet did to mitigate the effects of foreign currency exchange rate fluctuations."
"The Lady CFO" is expanding the proper title by adding an extra term that's not necessary or typical. You can't combine the "the" and "lady" into a title without it making the title itself be weirdly gendered.
(I don't have anything intelligent to say about the second part of your comment - I'm curious to know how others view it.)
The trigger event is just the stone in the stone soup, the macguffin, the tiny impurity that the crystal nucleates on. The specifics of the event have no relevance.
Such a charged atmosphere.
The investor added an unnecessary qualification to her title, and some folks decided to point that out by adding the same unnecessary qualification to their title.
If you do not find that charged, then we have to make do with the significant degree to which our definitions of that word differ.
What do you think the response would have been if he had directed a question to "the black CTO"?
Isn't the reason "the black CTO" sounds so bad is because the situation is even more charged?
Charged to me means that people are on edge, potentially feeling unsafe, and are ready to make various assumptions in reaction to something that would normally be considered fairly benign. Such reactions may very well be justified, but that doesn't mean the overall situation is somehow normal.
Black, lady, German, etc., are all just factual descriptors. It is the additional meaning that we assign to them that may make these descriptors sound bad. I do not believe that asking people to walk on eggshells around terms like "woman" and "lady" is a move in the right direction. That may even generate extra resentment. I'd rather change how people think and act. I don't think it's a great thing that people are afraid to say "the black CTO". A better world is not one where nobody acknowledges things like gender or race, but a world where those things are not grounds for diminishing a person.
There's also a question of whether it's contextually relevant. In this case, the question had everything to do with her CFO-ness and nothing to do with her gender. In a different context, it might have made sense to direct a question to someone on the board specifically because of their gender or race. But this wasn't such a context.
The article, as it is written, doesn't do a very good job of presenting the context. Without additional context, I very much doubt the investor was trying to be sexist or offensive with their statement, and I don't think they deserve such a backlash. It's picking at straws. The investor is human, too. There are better targets.
I think that's rather the point... If the investor were aware of the sexist nature of his comment, it wouldn't be necessary to raise awareness in the first place. Just because something isn't malicious doesn't mean it isn't sexist. It comes across as a diminutive affix.
Yes.
Everyone gets to decide whether things are sexist, whether and when that's a problem, and whether another person having different opinions about any of that should effect the way they act towards that person.
Really, the fact that this is even being focused on as sexism is crazy. In much of the world women are actually being brutally oppressed, and I would assume that the overwhelming majority of people involved in complaining about minor events like this have not and probably never will do anything to address that. So do they really care, or are they just virtue signaling?