Woman competing in Tour de France

[VeloVT]

My take on this: it's probably true that the joke was intended to be about the president of the company and not about women, but there is enough latitude to reasonably misinterpret it that they should have killed the idea anyway. It's a little bit like that New Yorker cover with the Obamas dressed as militants/extremists with a picture of Osama Bin Laden and a burning American flag behind them in the Oval Office. The cover was actually poking fun at the fear-mongerers/hate-mongerers, NOT at the Obamas, but the image was so powerful that the fear-mongering message subsumed the irony/subtext. While the cartoon was actually quite clever and punchy, putting it on the cover was a bad decision for the aforementioned reason. Sometimes you have to look at all of the messages that you could be sending, and not just the message you intend to send.