[Only in the plural is a woman likely to be called a guy .] You can say, ‘Call Mary and Jane and see if those guys want to come to dinner tonight,’ … but you can’t say, ‘I wanted to invite Alice, but the guy wasn’t answering her calls.’ This usage may be related to the tendency to use guy as a kind of perky pseudo-pronoun – nowadays you hear people using a phrase like ‘those guys ‘ to refer to everything from ski boots to PowerPoint slides.



