In my area “dude” is really gender neutral in most cases.

Regional dialects and all that.

Funnily enough so is “man” in a lot of cases.

For example: “Man I don’t know what’s going on anymore.” In this case “man” is less a reference to anyone in any specific way and more like an exasperation (like fuck, shit, hell, etc) and is a really common usage.

Edit: As an example of it’s gender-neutralness, “Fuck man, chill it’s just the wrong order.” In this case “man” is often used in a gender neutral way when referring to a specific person. Also man in this case can be swapped with “bro” and “dude”.

Regional dialects can get really weird in some cases, we use the same words but the meanings can be so different.

Language is a beautiful tangled knot that depending on which side you’re looking at it from it can change so much.