One usage that is definitely single-sex is, one male might say to another male,
"Hi guy, how ya doin'?"
"OK, guy, let me tell you how to do this."
But he'd never say that to a female.
However, it wouldn't be that unusual to say to a whole group of women, whether one is male OR female,
"Hi guys, let's get started."
'Female' is the adjective; 'woman' is the noun. It's neither difficult nor rude.
We manage it with 'male' and 'man' without controversy.
Adjectives and nouns are slippery things, and compound nouns exist besides.
FWIW, a quick corpus search of COCA[1] for `DET female VERB` [(a|the) female (eats|plays|chooses...)] yields 63 total attestations in the corpus (59 unique).
The same with `male` yields 65 (57 unique).
So it's a thing that happens in English.
That's an abbreviation of 'the female of the species' which is essentially writing out a definition of 'woman' except for the given species, since a woman is a human and there probably generally isn't an equivalent (and if there is it won't be widely known) for most species.
Other than to humorous effect (Wodehouse was fond of it) it is redundant and not useful for describing humans. The female of the human species is called a woman, and this is widely known.
> relax
> So it's a thing that happens in English.
I don't have to like it.
Using the wrong their/they're/there is also 'a thing that happens in English', if by English we mean the words of people aiming to use it.
An interesting intuition, do you have anything to back it up?
> I don't have to like it.
Now that I empathize with, but I don't think there's much to be done in this case.
It (unlike the shortening) is grammatical, and a common enough phrase to have a Wikipedia disambiguation page:
"A female will find multiple mates in spring" "The male burrows deep into the ground in the winter and begins to hibernate"
These seem fine to me and are not strict shortenings of "The Female of the Species".
Chief, on the other hand, I've only heard directed at males.
Only that one guy would use it for one person, sometimes similar to whatchamacallit: "Guy! Whaddareya doin up there?!" "C'mon, guy! We're gonna be late!" "Any of you guys see my toolbox? Did guy take it again?" (Which guy, man? Dude, there's like ten guys here. Bro, you gotta be more specific.)