Guys and anything
Lately I have noticed the young people doing something that seems strange to me. (By “young people” I mean people my age and younger.) They use “guys” almost categorically when referring to males as a group. This wouldn’t be so weird, except that there’s no parallel term (for me) that refers to females, and so when they refer to both males and females, the references seem unequal, because they’ll use terms for females that have equivalents for males but they won’t use the equivalent terms for males. They’ll talk about “the girls” and “the guys,” but also “the women” and “the guys,” and I think I even heard once “the ladies” and “the guys”. To me, “girls” and “women” are used in different contexts (something about age or maturity; let’s not even touch how “ladies” is used), and “guys” should only work as the counterpart to “girls” if anything at all. And they never say “boys,” which I realize is due to “girls” cutting a much wider swath of applicability than “boys” - you can refer to girls of many different ages, but boys seems only to be under 18 (but why??). So they talk about college-aged “girls” but college-aged “guys,” and also college-aged “women” but still college-aged “guys.”
This is especially interesting when you consider that definitions of “guys” are gender-neutral (MW):
3 a: man, fellow b: person —used in plural to refer to the members of a group regardless of sex
Is plural “guys” gaining gender? Did Guys and Dolls start this?