More than 800 members of Google’s staff are standing together in a showing against sexism today by appending a single word to their job titles: “Lady.”
Business Insider has details on the protest, which is happening in response to a ludicrous comment made during Alphabet’s shareholder meeting last week, when someone referred to company CFO Ruth Porat as the organization’s “lady CFO.”
The internet immediately exploded in outrage over the sexist remark, and now, one week later, Google’s staff has found its own way of responding. According to Business Insider, someone made the title change suggestion to an email group, and it quickly caught on. They launched an internal site to promote the protest, which was planned for this Thursday and Friday. It even got this awesome GIF featuring some of Google’s newly proposed emoji:
GoogleIn a statement to USA Today, Meg Mason, Google’s partner operations manager for shopping — or, for today, its lady partner operations manager for shopping — says of the protest, “I wanted to do something fun and ‘Googley’ that allowed us all to stand together, and to show that someone’s gender is entirely irrelevant to how they do their job.”
Women and men within the company are adopting the lady prefix, making the change over these two days in their email signatures and within Google’s internal directory, according to Business Insider. It’s a smart and simple response that, like Mason says, effectively conveys just how irrelevant gender is to being able to do your job.
