My thoughts on this topic in the past have considered whether the speaker, assuming his interlocutor to be male, is exhibiting subconscious biases that are partly responsible for the gender skew in the IT industry in the first place. I tend to take the view that speakers who use male-specific language can be (gently) re-educated, just in the same way help-vampires can be encouraged to write better questions.
I see this behaviour in questions frequently, and generally I try to edit it out; I see you guys a lot, with dudes and "mate" much less so. I'll digress from the consensus here and venture to say that, if these words are becoming less gender specific, they haven't achieved it entirely. From a British perspective, the use of "mate" to refer to a woman is fine from a speaker of either gender if he/she knows her well, but otherwise (for me at least) some gender specificity still lingers. On Stack Overflow, where discussion parcipants don't know each other, I think it sticks out like a huge sore thumb; after all, this is a professional resource site, not a chat room.
As someone else says here, I would balance this issue with a sensitivity to people whose first language is not English, and who may just be occasionally selecting a clumsy word.
What to do? Well, if it is persistent, you could try explaining the issue to the speaker, so long as it is clear they are not struggling with their English. Also, there are various guides on "how to ask technical questions" around the web, and I think it would be a positive step if they could touch on this. I've included it in mine already.
