[urda]

> > fellas

> Not just men! Men, Women, and everything in between.

  fella (fel·la) 
  - nonstandard spelling of fellow, used in representing speech in various dialects.

So we follow 'fellow':

  fellow (fel·low)
  - a person in the same position, involved in the same activity, or otherwise associated with another.

And so we can conclude that this is completely fine. It can easily be reasoned that the GP was using it to refer to a generic group of individuals not just a single gender. By you drawing attention to it when it was a proper usage of the word, actually does more harm than good to your cause.

[exoducks]

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fella https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/fella

Nearly every usage of "fella" I've heard has had a "male" implication. At least in US English.

[urda]

> Nearly every usage of "fella" I've heard has implied that it referred to a male.

Neat, and I've heard it implied multiple times to refer to generic groups of people, in US English as well too just like you. The thing though we need to consider is definitions, facts, sentence context, and even the auhtor's intent much more heavily then both of our personal experiences.

It can easily be argued based on context that the author's intent was to refer to a group of people generically, they even used the "nonstandard" and generic version of the word.

Personal anecdotes do not make facts.

[exoducks]

> Personal anecdotes do not make facts.

That's precisely why I provided links to two dictionaries. Not the definition google spoon feeds you when you type in "define fella"

[urda]

I provided facts as well, so let's use your own sources shall we?

  A person in the same position, involved in the same activity, or otherwise associated with another. [1]

You conveniently ignored that when you attempted to mispaint actual facts in your comment. Here I'll even add another source:

  ​used of people or a person with whom you share something, esp. the same kind of job, interest, or experience [2]

[1] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/fellow

[2] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/fello...

[exoducks]

You linked to "fellow", not "fella".

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/fella

[urda]

Did you read my original comment at all? I'm sorry, I'm not engaging you on this any further.

[DanBC]

Fella is overwhelmingly used as a gendered term to refer to men.

How many real world examples of fella being used to refer to women can you find?

[mattlondon]

Not sure what dictionary you used, but this sounds highly irregular to me as a native UK English speaker. I've never heard of "fella" being used to refer to anything but someone of male gender.

That said, clearly our experiences and interpretations differ.

There is no right or wrong here. As such I dont think we can easily reason that they were using it to refer to generic group at all as clearly there is confusion and different interpretations of the word. Using "fellas" to address colleagues in an email (for example) that includes non-males may lead you to inadvertently offending people who share my interpretation of the word.

I think it would be better for everyone to just use non-gendered terms in the first place to avoid this sort of confusion and potential to give offense (e.g. "guys" is another loaded term: some people think it is non-gendered, whilst others think it is strongly-gendered - as such probably best avoided in a lot of situations).

Some alternative options that are non-gendered could have been "people", "applicants", or "potential employees" (and for the "hi guys"/"hi fellas" email opening you can just do "hi all" or "hi everyone")