I have to disagree. It seems to me fairly sensible that when you are
entering a persons details, one of the first things you are likely to enter
is the title. And if you choose it from a list/combo, then you can limit
the choices to sensible titles, and at the same time pick up the gender in
many cases, which you often need anyway. Conversely, if you select the
gender first, you can limit the titles to show only the ones applicable to
that gender. Either way, you reduce some of the work for the data entry.
Limiting the list to "sensible" titles is in practice a way of ensuring
that sooner or later the database will reject a legitimate title that
the programmers didn't think of. At a minimum this causes delay and
confusion; at worst it can offend a client and cost big money. More
flexible validation is needed.
Also, data entry people shouldn't be wasting time using the mouse to
select items from combos: they should be using the keyboard and letting
the combo's AutoExpand do the work. In that case a few items more or
less in the list makes no difference to the data entry task.
(In terms of data validation, however, there's a case for checking title
against gender and raising a flag for a female "Mr" or male "Ms".)