Why You Shouldn't Refer to Your Team as "Ladies"

If you get referred to as "ladies" in your corporate emails, I suspect you wish you could send a link to this post to the email sender.

Lately as the office, even the female team leader is calling our female team, "ladies."   The references makes me cringe.  Not that I oppose being a lady; I conduct myself as such.

Why don't you call us, "team?"

Why must you differentiate us as ladies just because we are all female?

Do you call your male team guys or gentlemen?

By the mere fact that you make a difference indicates to me that you, a male manager, also differentiate in the way you view us....and that is a big red flag.  Why do you view women  differently?

Where I work, the manager has two teams:  Our "sub-team" you can say, is all female.  I have never heard or read this manager refer to his other team as "ladies and gentlemen."   He's busted.  As the saying goes, your words disclose who you really are.

When getting annoyed a few times last week (with a female sub-team lead calling us ladies for the second time that week), I did a Google search and only found posts from females who said they didn't mind being called ladies.  

Well, after working hours, when out with my female friends of the same age, I don't mind if we refer to ourselves as "girls."  We know we're on equal ground; we respect one another.

But when I'm on the professional turf, working my best to compete in a dog-eat-cat world  (male dog bullying the female cat), I don't like reinforcing the prevailing and lingering subconscious influence of this culture -- that females in the workplace are any different than the male counterpoint.

The only differences I can detect is that we as females utilize a lot more right-brained resources....and perhaps that is why this whole ladies thing is very disconcerting to me!

OK, go team go!