Going no further than the opening post, man means person. Only by default does it imply male. Changing manhole cover or chairman to personhole cover or chairperson is both ignorant & redundant. It's redundant because it's unnecessary. It's ignorant because doing it only shows you don't understand the language you speak.

I should, at this juncture, point out that I have a little understanding of Anglo-Saxon, which is the foundation of English. More importantly, I once met the author Kathleen Herbert, who has rather more. It was HER that that pointed this out to me. Man means 'person'; nothing more, nothing less; properly, it should be qualified. Inevitably, though, people get lazy, and then misunderstand...

It should be "Mr Chairman", "Madame Chairman" (or whatever gender-definitive pronoun floats your boat! ;-) ). As she told me, wife is merely a shortening of "wife-man". Wife being pronounced wee-fah - the man i.e person that weaves. And etcetera.

All hail to Dave for trying to persuade random bunches of pixels to behave nicely towards each other. Sadly, it has about as much chance of success as my preceding... :-/