Froedtert Hospital has been named a 2017 Leader in LGBTQ Healthcare Equality by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, the educational arm of the country's largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning/queer civil rights organization.
Indeed, the data presented here confirm that dude is an address term that is used mostly by young men to address other young men; however, its use has expanded so that it is now used as a general address term for a group (same or mixed gender), and by and to women.
In the early 1960s, dude became prominent in surfer culture as a synonym of guy or fella. The female equivalent was dudette or dudess, but these have both fallen into disuse, and dude is now also used as a unisex term. This more general meaning of dude started creeping into the mainstream in the mid-1970s.