Hi guys! You don’t mind if I call you guys, right?

[noblegiraffe]

Just out of interest, if you are female:

YABU: yes, I do mind being referred to in a group as guys, even if it’s just a minor niggle that I will never bring up.

YANBU: I don’t give a toss if you refer to me in a group as a guys. It’s a gender-neutral word these days.

Well I hate it!

I dislike it. The male default.

To be honest I'd have different feelings about it depending on the circumstances.

With certain people it would raise my hackles, with others I'd probably not even noticed they'd used it.

There's a senior guy at work who often starts calls "Hi Chaps" and although it irritates me a bit, if you actually deal with him in person he is definitely not sexist, has women in his senior leadership team, and has been incredibly supportive of me and my development even though I'm not in his team. He just phrases things in a way sometimes I wish he was more aware of!

I think generally speaking if it was a large group of men and I was the only woman, I'd probably feel a bit like I was being dismissed, but if it was a reasonably mixed group I'd accept it as general word meaning "people". To be fair I've probably used it in the same context and it is definitely heading towards a "gender neutral" term now.

I use it in the classroom but not entirely happy with it

Mistressiggi I use ‘Class’ or ‘Year X’ Like ‘come on Y7, settle down.’

Calling a class ‘guys’ screams trendy young teacher to me!

Infuriating. Another crass Americanism. Can i Get a coffee?. Overly. Majorly. Ghastly, the whole lot of them.

Couldn't care less as long as people are polite. And ideally clean. Don't very often use it myself. Am 56 so far prefer it to madam.

I can't be arsed to mind about this.

I don't mind, although it grates a bit and smacks of somebody trying a bit too hard to ingratiate themselves with people. Also, whenever I see it in a thread title on MN, it makes me suspect the OP is a troll/lazy journalist looking to start a bun fight.

Just don't call me Cis!

It is male-defaulty

I’d like to see the rise of ‘peeps’

Our new boss calls everyone ‘mate’ which makes me cringe!

Hello everyone is perfectly useful !

Agree re the male default - I blame reading Invisible women, I see this everywhere now whereas before I did not notice

Doesn’t bother me at all. Wouldn’t even register with me.

I can live with it. It's seems a bit fake friendly but I don't really care that much.

Chaps and chapesses is the other one I have encountered !

@noblegiraffe

I use it in the classroom but not entirely happy with it

Mistressiggi I use ‘Class’ or ‘Year X’ Like ‘come on Y7, settle down.’

Calling a class ‘guys’ screams trendy young teacher to me!

Haha - I am definitely not trendy (nor particular young to be fair!), but I admit I used to call my class 'guys', until I started at a new school and on the first instance of doing it, was asked by a 5 year old why I was using a word for 'boys' when they weren't all boys! I tended to stick to 'folks', 'troop', 'people' when we were talking informally on the carpet, used the class name when more 'authority' was needed.

It's one of those words with somewhat ambiguous colloquial use now though - it's become fine colloquially to refer to a mixed-sex group as 'guys', but you'd never refer to a singular female as 'a guy'. Same with 'chaps' I suppose. I'd never refer to a mixed-sex group as 'lads' though - that doesn't make sense to me. But then there's question of 'why not?' if we're using 'guys' and 'chaps' that way??

This is making me think far too much for a Sunday evening...might need a lie down to ponder this and masculine terms being readily adopted for female usage...a headache is brewing I think!

I hear teachers using it fairly frequently. Gives me the impression they're trying too hard to be cool and "down with the kidz", given that even a 25-year-old teacher is ancient as far as a teenager is concerned. (Having said that, I'm not very keen on "boys and girls" either...)

@Butterer

I get more irritated by 'folks'.

Or folx.

@Mistressiggi

I use it in the classroom but not entirely happy with it - teenagers don't like "boys and girls" I sometimes say "ladies and gentlemen" but that's a bit too formal - I need a new word!

Everyone/everybody? Very straightforward. Or the name of the form, if applicable?

I don't consider "guys" to be gender-neutral. I dislike the term, even if being applied to a group of only-males. It sounds dated -1970s Britain trying to sound trendily American.

Come to think of it, maybe some of my antipathy to the term is that when reading the word I 'hear' it in a 'Jimmy Saville' voice. The word has baggage.

@StillNoFuckingEyeDeer

I like 'guys'. Can't even see why it's offensive?

Guys are men. Would you like a mixed group being addressed as 'gentlemen'.

I’m not keen on ‘guys’, but it does seem to be used in a gender neutral way these days, so I’m not going to get too huffy about it.

Everyone is referred to as ‘de lads’ here. The first time someone in a shop said ‘hey lads, what are you looking for?’, I turned around thinking he was speaking to some other people, rather than my husband and I (middle aged couple).

My female friends always refer to any all women groups as ‘de lads’ too, so I guess I’ll have to get used to it.

It sounds dumb. Guy isn't gender neutral. You don't talk about your female friends as "these guys I know". Hi ladies, girls, etc isn't gender neutral either.

Unacorda thanks for suggestions! I could say "everyone" a lot of the time I think, but sometimes I'm being more specific (ie not talking to the whole class but a group). I won't always remember what the class name is! I could say "right first years" etc I suppose. I tend to use pet names instead but I'm sure that will offend someone too

Agree re the male default - I blame reading Invisible women, I see this everywhere now whereas before I did not notice

Yes! Invisible Women was the eye-opener. I think ‘guys’ is a minor example of male-as-default that permeates pretty much everything.

And scales up to being actively dangerous for women because we aren’t ever considered as important in our own right!