Hey, Guys! That Means You, Ladies.

A recent Washington Post article officially deemed the use of guys as gender-neutral, meaning you can call a mixed group or group of all women, guys. Not only does the author consider it gender-neutral, but she says we should celebrate that the word has evolved to be so. I am someone who tries not to say guys when referring to women, but regularly still do it. I’m also the person that cringes when I realize I’ve said it. The term default male pops into my head and I feel as if I am doing a great disservice to my fellow women by defaulting to a male construct. 

Default Male

The idea of default male first became a term I understood after reading Caroline Criado Perez’s book Invisible Women, a book every guy in the world should read. In it, she gives hundreds of examples of how women have been made invisible by being left out of consideration from how roads are plowed to clothing design to car safety testing to drug and medical testing. Once you become aware of these inequities, how often test studies use default males and how deadly it can be, you will not go gently into accepting that guys is gender-neutral. And what does Perez think of the term guys being gender-neutral? She tweets, “would you call a woman a guy? no? then it's still gendered. default male is still male.”

The Poll

So what did our LinkedIn poll say? You can see results and comments here and here.

Another non-scientific Twitter survey showed that a vast majority of men and women thought guys was gender-neutral only when saying “Hey, guys,” but other usages such as saying “I’m going out with the guys,” was definitely not. One of our survey commenters pointed out that if you identify as male and straight and would you never ever say “Yeah, I dated a lot of guys in college before marrying my wife,” then guys is definitely not gender-neutral. Context matters here.

Several other women who worked in male-dominated industries commented that they were often called guys, but then the person would realize what they said and quickly add “and gals.” These women felt embarrassed and singled out when that occurred and would have much preferred the speaker stick with just guys.

Many others mentioned that most likely those that voted that the term was gender-neutral were mostly men. Well….since I made the poll, I was able to look into the results and I was surprised to find that all three answers were fairly evenly divided between men and women.

To get one more perspective, I turned to the kids in my life and asked them what they thought. The younger ones (age 10) thought guys was gender-neutral (after I explained what gender-neutral meant!). The teenagers all said something similar to, “It doesn’t sound gender-neutral but it is used that way.” Good news: The kids are alright.

Finally, as I was going to publish this as a post, I quickly googled guys to find a picture to post with it. Only pictures of groups of men popped up. Not a single woman.

Can We Do Better?

I expect that many minds will not be changed from thinking about why we should or should not use guys, but I have some thoughts.  We shouldn’t beat ourselves up (or even correct ourselves) when we use the term guys, but we should all be doing a better job to uplevel our language to be more inclusive. Start using truly gender-neutral words like folks, yinz (I had to look that one up), team, all, everyone, and my personal favorite, earthlings. Because it never hurts to be inclusive and to do better.